Re: Anyone know where to find Music Studio songs/instruments and other IIGS Midi files?

[a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

"Mike Keppel" <lps_keppel@hotmail.com> wrote:

>I remember a time when GEnie and Compuserve would have tons of midi/sound
>files for IIGS applications like Music Studio and Deluxe Music Construction

    Actually that's Music Construction Set, Deluxe MCS was never released.

>Set.  I have been searching the net to find some of these midi files written
>specifically for these applications, but cannot find any.

    While both offered MIDI support, neither allowed you to import actual
generic MIDI data files. They did however have their own music file 
format that was specific to the Apple IIgs versions.

>Does anyone know of a site that might have these files or if somone has a
>collection of them they would like to share with myself and others?  I am
>wanting to post a midi section on my webpage, but need some content for
>these applications.

    About a decade ago I posted a collection of Music Construction Set
compositions by Francois Labelle (a local IIgs user from my area) to the
comp.binaries.apple2 group. These go far beyond what else was 
circulating at the time though. In addition to several original pieces
of his own, he input very accurate and professional sounding renditions 
of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart and Schubert. Ah, I found my
original BinScii posting archived on the Ground site...

ftp://ground.ecn.uiowa.edu/apple2/apple16/Music/Songs/Mcs/mcs.3

    As for Music Studio, I do have a one or two disk collection of songs
but I remember most being simple MIDI translations. The exception to
this blandness would be all the original pieces Gene Koh composed
for SoftDisk G-S (unfortunately you'd have to look on early issues of 
SDGS to find them).

>If you know of a place or if you would like to share some midi files, please
>email me at steakum47@hotmail.com

    Generic MIDI files can be downloaded from just about anywhere online,
though there's a few decent archive sites if you know where to look.
You can convert and listen to them through MIDIsynth on the IIgs 
(Dave Tribby's MIDI Surgeon for example) but the results will usually
be less than spectacular if you try GM/GS based MIDI files. I posted
a fair number of my own MIDIsynth songs back in the early to mid
90's, some came out sounding not too badly (especially those with
my own custom wavebank patches). :-)

    There were several songs files released for MIDIsynth (synthLAB),
Diversi-Tune and especially Soundsmith. As a matter of fact, Francois
composed a few original and very decent Soundsmith pieces I 
uploaded years back ("MegaTune", "Rascaphobia", etc) worth
checking out too.

Mitchell Spector
a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca