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From: m204help@cca.CCA.COM (Keith Hedger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: reading from the midi port
Message-ID: <14085@cca.CCA.COM>
Date: Wed, 18-Mar-87 11:30:10 EST
Article-I.D.: cca.14085
Posted: Wed Mar 18 11:30:10 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 21-Mar-87 04:19:27 EST
Organization: Computer Corp. of America, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 28


I am trying to read data from the midi in port on the 520 ST  and
am having a problem. My program is written in MEGAMAX C and basically
grabs midi data a byte at a time and stuffs it into an array...when the
array reaches a length of 78 it is displayed on the screen and a new
string starts getting written. My problem is that I hook up a sequencer
to my ST and start it putting out midi data and start running my program.
My program always displays 4 or 5 lines of midi data then exits the program.
(In other words the sequencer is still running). If I stop the sequencer 
and run the program again, it typically puts out another 4 or 5 lines of 
midi data then stops. I run it again and the port is clear.
My program is basically built with a big 'while' loop which says
'while data is at the midi in port do blah blah blah'.
I have seen some messages from the 'bix' section of Byte where people
were saying that they had had the same kind of problem, and that the 
buffer that handles incoming midi data is too small....they allocated
their own buffer large enough to handle the data.
My question is: If the buffer is filling, why would having my program
read from it and stuff the data into a bigger buffer, work any better
than reading data from it and putting it into strings to be output ?
Is putting the data in strings to be output that much slower than moving
the data into an internal buffer ????
I would appreciate any suggestions any of you MIDI hackers out there can
give me.
thanx,
keith hedger

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