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From: barrett@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Dan Barrett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy,comp.sys.amiga.audio
Subject: Re: "Multitasking with MIDI" in _Electronic Musician_
Message-ID: <7626@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU>
Date: 20 Feb 91 21:08:13 GMT
References: <20357@shlump.nac.dec.com>
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Organization: The Johns Hopkins University - HCF
Lines: 74
Followup-To:


In article <20357@shlump.nac.dec.com> robinson@star.enet.dec.com (Dave Robinson) writes:
>  The March 1991 issue of _Electronic Musician_ presents an
>  article titled "Multitasking with MIDI", by Rudy Trubitt that I
>  believe damns the Amiga with faint praise.

	The article made me a little sad, but it seemed rather realistic.
The Amiga's multitasking make it a great platform for coexisting MIDI
applications, but there is a lack of MIDI applications that can share MIDI
data other than saving and loading Standard MIDI Files.  But I don't know
if the situation is much better on other computers.

>  So, can people please provide lots of data.  Opinions are OK ,but I
>  know everyone here likes the Amiga.  What I really need is data:
>  o An update on the MIDI Manager-like" standard Commodore is
>    developing.

	All I've heard is that it's called camd.library or something like
that.

>  o Examples of multitasking MIDI applications and data
>    sharing.

	Multitasking MIDI applications is easy -- most modern Amiga MIDI
programs can coexist because they open the serial port in "shared" mode.
I have written several MIDI utilities myself, and they all coexist just
fine.

	On the other hand, there's isn't much data sharing going on that I
have seen.  Bill Barton's free midi.library has this capability, but few
commercial applications (if any) use it.

>  o Where do Arexx and the clipboard fit into a possible
>    rebuttal to the statement about no data sharing standard?

	Not too well.  Both ARexx and the clipboard provide the POSSIBILITY
of data sharing among music applications, but how many programs can you
name that actually LET YOU DO IT?  Right now, available at your dealer,
and not promises or vaporware?

	Also, ARexx isn't that fast.  MIDI must be as real-time as possible.
I can see using ARexx to grab data from a sequencer and put it into a score
program, but I can't see a chain of ARexx modules processing the MIDI data
in real time.

>  Can't someone with two serial ports and two MIDI interfaces
>  load patches on one synth while a sequencer plays another?

	Sure, no problem.

	I just thought of an interesting way that applications can share
Standard MIDI Files (SMF).  Let A and B be two sequencers.  Tell sequencer A
to save a SMF to the file:

		pipe:xx

and tell sequencer B to read a SMF from the same file.  Using this pipe,
your SMF gets transferred from sequencer A to sequencer B.  But this isn't
much different from saving your SMF to a disk file first.

	Another example that I just made up (haven't tried it).  Suppose you
have an ARexx-compatible MIDI sequencer and an ARexx-compatible database.
You could probably tell the sequencer to save its files in the database
transparently instead of ordinary disk files, allowing (for example) more
sophisticated categorizing of sequences.

                                                        Dan

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