Re: Need IIe, IIgs MIDI software

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Mitch wrote:

>I'd been to your page before I went to sleep last
>night. I tried some download links and they didn't
>work. That is partially due to my Mozilla browser. I
>gave up before I read about RT.SYNTH. I was pretty
>tired. I downloaded RT.SYNTH today using the iCab
>browser (Mac), which has an excellent download manager.
>I couldn't download the mp3s no matter what I did.

Curious, I haven't had any trouble with them on several
different computers, including Macs...

It's harder on a machine you can't "right-click" on,
although I understand that's being fixed.  ;-)

> From what I've read on your site about RT.SYNTH it
>looks like a great accomplishment! I especially like
>the fact that you can play more than two keys at a
>time. Nice!

Of course, only the last struck key plays--it's still
single-voice--but it makes the keyboard action much
more "musical".

>I get the feeling that it won't do MIDI in or out
>through my Passport Designs MIDI Interface Card. Oh
>well, it's amazing to me that you even got it to read
>MIDI files at all. At least I can write a MIDI track
>for RT.SYNTH, play it, and record it. Would it be
>difficult to get RT.SYNTH to read MIDI from an outside
>source?

Actually, there aren't as many single-voice MIDI tracks
as you might think.  ;-(

I haven't run any (solo) music on RT.Synth that was derived
from MIDI files, though MIDI.CONVERT (part of the CrateSynth
package) will certainly create (multi-voice) music files
from MIDI files.  It would be pretty simple to write an
Applesoft program to extract a single "oscillator" stream
from the output of MIDI.CONVERT, and it would be in the
same form as RT.SYNTH music.

The problem is that MIDI.CONVERT does not just convert a
single solo track, but converts all tracks, and dynamically
assigns oscillators, so a particular track is not all in
a single oscillator's "music" stream.

It could be modified to do that, but, as I noted, most MIDI
music has multi-voiced tracks, so it might not be as useful
as you would wish.

Controlling RT.SYNTH from an external MIDI source is an
interesting idea.  It can be done, but would involve some
low-level MIDI card UART programming, since it would have
to be polled for status changes.  Interrupts would be a
problem, since they would certainly be audible as pops.

RT.SYNTH was designed to work on ordinary Apple //e's, with
no hard-to-get adornments, so MIDI input was never a serious
contender.  Think of it as a "performance" synth, not a
"player" synth--though it can play back its own performances.

>I own an ALF synth card for the Apple II, which I
>believe was be the first synthesizer for a personal
>computer. I haven't used it yet, but it looks like
>programming it to play music is laborious. Not as nice
>as loading a MIDI file. I'm really looking forward to
>firing the ALF up, and especially to using RT.SYNTH.

The ALF is a multiple-squarewave oscillator card, as is
the MockingBoard.  Multiple voices are nice, but they are
all reedy squarewaves, a limitation not shared by RT.SYNTH.

The only Apple II add-in that supported wavetable synthesis
was the Mountain Music System, a 2-card extension that
provided 16 wavetable digital oscillators using DMA from
the Apple's memory.

-michael

Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's
http://members.aol.com.mjmahon