sahayman@watmath.waterloo.edu (Steve Hayman) (03/02/88)
>>What books should I get/avoid? Abacus' line of ST books seem >>interesting, but I've seen them flamed/praised, and I'm not so sure. I was generally happy with books 2 and 3 (Internals, and GEM, can't remember the exact titles, sorry) but was quite disappointed with book 10, Introduction to MIDI. For example, the book completely overlooks the important aspect of reading MIDI data from the synthesizer and time-stamping it so that you can send it out again properly (since MIDI itself contains no notion of duration codes - all it is are note-start and note-end commands, and the application software has to pause for the appropriate length of time between the start and end of the note.) There was some sort of a throwaway line in the book like "We have decided to leave this aspect of MIDI programming up to you, so that you'll have something to do!" How about "We don't know how to do it!", if that's what you mean. I think the book would be interesting to people who either know nothing at all about MIDI or who would like to see complete source code for a large application [it's a program for creating tunes by picking notes and time durations off of a menu - but I don't think it ever actually *reads* anything from the synthesizer] - but if you already know something about what the MIDI protocol is or are looking for discussion of some truly useful MIDI routines or programming techniques or advanced features of the MIDI standard, this is probably not the book for you. Buy "Keyboard" magazine instead, the monthly columns there are much more useful. Steve Hayman U. of Waterloo sahayman@math.waterloo.edu
wheels@mks.UUCP (Gerry Wheeler) (03/03/88)
In article <17191@watmath.waterloo.edu>, sahayman@watmath.waterloo.edu (Steve Hayman) writes: > I was generally happy with books 2 and 3 I don't know about that. I thought the internals book suffered from poor translation. It seemed that, in many cases, they got mixed up as to which chip was generating the signal and which was receiving it. Anybody else think that too? However, for educational purposes, the BIOS listing is interesting. -- Gerry Wheeler Phone: (519)884-2251 Mortice Kern Systems Inc. UUCP: uunet!watmath!mks!wheels 35 King St. North BIX: join mks Waterloo, Ontario N2J 2W9 CompuServe: 73260,1043