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From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,rec.music.synth
Subject: Re: Amiga midi problems?
Message-ID: <25072@sun.uucp>
Date: Thu, 6-Aug-87 17:58:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.25072
Posted: Thu Aug  6 17:58:24 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 8-Aug-87 16:51:54 EDT
References: <1408@ico.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
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Xref: mnetor comp.sys.amiga:7198 rec.music.synth:1221

In article <1408@ico.UUCP> scottw@ico.UUCP (Scott Wiesner) writes:
>According to the "Computers and Music" writer in Keyboard magazine, the
>Amiga has an unreliable timer chip that causes problems in sequencers 
>written on the amiga.  I've considered an Atari ST or one of the new 
>A500's to driver my ESQ-1, and while the ST seems to be the machine of 
>choice for synth stuff, the Amiga seems better overall.  If the rumors
>of A500's showing up in mass retailers for Christmas is true, it should
>be the better machine for long term support too.  The only down side to
>the Amiga is the report mentioned above.  
>
>Can anyone provide more info?

This is of course, pure baloney. One of the timers are available to the
serial port and the resolution is down their in the microseconds. What
Keyboard and others have been misled by was the fact that a lot of people
use the serial.device to do MIDI, and while it can handle the baud rate
it does not timestamp the incoming events so you have to kludge that in.
This is generally not acceptable to 'pro' MIDI muscians. David Joiner of
MicroIllusions (author of Faery Tale) wrote a midi.device for their upcoming
music program. It was written as a MIDI device, doesn't support any baudrate
but 31.25K etc etc. Works fine from what I hear. If anyone cares to write
one and wouldn't mind putting it out for not too much money I would be
interested in it. I have this strange desire to see to new devices written
for the Amiga, MIDI: and SYNTH:. The latter would be similar to soundscape's
'speaker' module in that you could open the device and send MIDI events to
it and it would play music out the speaker. To turn the Amiga into a MIDI
voice box with 4 voices would then be as simple as 
1> COPY MIDI: SYNTH:
You might want to have SYNTH0 - SYNTH3 for more accurate Audio channel selection.


--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.