UUCJEFF@ECNCDC.BITNET (02/11/89)
Hi Rob, I have a Mega ST 2 in which I do a lot of midi stuff with sythesizers and drum machines. I have the Hybrid Arts SMPTE Track which is very expensive buy also very good. Most serious users like the Hybrid, but the C-Lab (imported from Germany) is going to give it some competution. It is slightly cheaper. Next would be the KCS by DR Ts. It is fairly good as for editting features and also can be gotten for around 100. Hybrid Arts makes another very cheap sequencer, but it does not have much in the way of editting. For patch librarians, again DR T's seem to give you a reasonable amount of useful features for the lowest cost, but there are some more sophisticated ones at higher prices. A patch librarian is always related to a specific synthesizer, you cannot use a CZ librarian for a DX-7 . If you have a lot of little midi devices which use System Exclusives to set up patches, you probably want to get Gen Patch by Hybrid Arts. It can be used with every MIDI device, including synthesizers, but usually the MIDI data is in a bulk dump form and so it is less user friendly than buying a synthesizer dependent librarian I discussed earlier. It is kind of hard to explain MIDI stuff in one note, I am not the best one for that anyway since I develope my own stuff for my own music compositions and therefore have de-emphasised the acquisition of commericial software. I have the Hybrid SMPTE track, and want to get the Steinberg Librarian for my TX-802, but dont really have much else. The scoring programs are around Jeff Beer, UUCJEFF@ECNCDC.BITNET - more later -rs by the same company. Jeff Beer, UUCJEFF@ECNCDC.BITNET ... more later.
jrd@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.SYMBOLICS.COM (John R. Dunning) (04/15/89)
Can anybody out there tell me the "right" way to read a bunch of midi data? I have some code that reads byte-at-a-time using Bconin(3), and that works until I tell my synthesizer (a Kawai K1) to dump its whole patch database. That apparently causes buffer overruns inside the ST, as the first few patches come thru ok, but the rest is gubbish. Transferring small amounts of data works. In the OSBIND defs, I see Mfpint; is that something to do with getting MIDI interrupts for incoming data? Also, about a year ago, a fragment of C code called midisys flew by on this list; it appears to be low-level interrupt handlers that hack the ACIA directly. Anybody remember it, used it, etc? One of the things it does is snag a batch of vectors with Kbdvbase() and grab the MIDI one; does anybody know which one that is? Finally, code fragments, in any language, would be welcome. Thanks in advance for any and all info.