[Pythonmac-SIG] Re: Mac, MIDI and sysex

[Doug Wyatt]

Hi,

At 22:28 -0400 7/27/98, Bill Dozier wrote:
> >Recently, Jack Jansen <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl> said:
> >> The
> >> quicktime midi interface is just plain broken, because you have to do
> >> all your own timing. The other stuff like OMS is just as bad, as far
> >> as I understand it.
> >
> >As it was just pointed out to me that there are people on the list
> >involved with implementing these I guess I should qualify these
> >statements:-)
> >
> >What I meant was: both OMS and quicktime midi assume that the program
> >using them is in charge of its own timing, so it can give the right
> >quicktime calls or send the right OMS messages at the correct
> >time. They unfortunately don't seem to have an interface that allows
> >you to stuff a number of time values and command/arguments into a
> >buffer and say "here, go do these and tell me when its done", such as
> >the Sound Manager has (and, to a lesser extent, QuickTime for movies,
> >where you only have to call MoviesTask once in a while and that's it).

More as a reaction to the increasing lameness of operating systems than
programmer-friendliness, I think the next major revision of OMS will
probably support some way to schedule MIDI output in advance.  And choke it
off if you change your mind.  (The MPU-401 returns!)


> Apparently "Midishare" has this functionality. I'm trying to grok their
> documentation; unfortunately much of the example code is in Pascal and
> pretty much all of the comments are in French.
>
> The guy that wrote OMS is in PSA (Doug Wyatt). It would be great if he did
> a Mac/Windows PyMidi, no?

Sorry, I don't really do Windows much, but I understand that MME isn't that
horrible to program.  I've played around a bit with Python and MIDI, and
even got something primitive working at one point, but I must have archived
the source because it doesn't seem to be on my hard disk ...

I wish I could volunteer to do this, but between work and trying to stay
sane by playing music, I really don't have the time.  If someone else would
find the project a bit less daunting by my offering to help, I'm available
to answer questions ...

Doug


--
Doug Wyatt                             doug@sonosphere.com
Sonosphere (electric/improv music)     http://www.sonosphere.com/
"Accidental Beauties" CD release:      http://www.sonosphere.com/wyatt/
available from CMC, 1-800-882-4262     http://www.MusicDiscoveries.com/