Xref: utzoo rec.music.synth:5672 comp.sys.mac.programmer:3764
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!dewey.soe.berkeley.edu!oster
From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: rec.music.synth,comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Wish-List: Decent MIDI support for the Macintosh
Keywords: Mac, MIDI
Message-ID: <27412@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 7 Jan 89 19:38:06 GMT
References: <1180@etive.ed.ac.uk> <27248@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <436@sendai.ann-arbor.mi.us>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley
Lines: 17

Time for me to apologize.  The new sound manager documentation I just
recieved from Apple says that the current midi drivers built in to the
current sound manager mostly provide a way to translate sound calls by
Mac programs to play out the MIDI port.  It specifically says that
using these drivers to do input from a keyboard is probably a waste of
time because they aren't good enough yet.

There are MIDI drives in the current System File, it is just that they are
so primitive that Apple doesn't want to talk about them much.

I still think the architecture is a good ones: pipelines of filter
procedures that communicate by passing messages, actually pascal records,
from one to the next, and routines to insert and remove pipeline stages.
It seems like this structure would be good for getting, say,
editr/librarians and sequencers, and the Mac's sound output itself, all
going under MIDI in a unified environment.  Unfortunately, it isn't here
yet.