\pard\tx960\tx1920\tx2880\tx3840\tx4800\tx5760\tx6720\tx7680\tx8640\tx9600\f0\b0\i0\ul0\fs28\fc0 Q: What music software is there for NeXT Computers?\
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A: NeXT Computers are an ideal music platform with their built-in CD-quality sound and DSP sound synthesis. Several companies have announced commercial music software for the NeXT. Metaresearch's SoundWorks is a sound editor that features digital recording, mixing, and editing. Imagine has announced First Chair, a MIDI and audio sequencer that will include SMPTE synchronization and multimedia capabilities. World Class Software is developing a program called Songwriter's Toolbox, which is a training, analysis, and production environment for composing songs in a variety of contemporary musical styles. Coda was working on MusicProse, a notation program, but has no immediate plans to ship it. See the Software and Peripherals Catalog for more details on these programs. (You can get the catalog by calling 800-848-NeXT in the U.S.)\
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NeXT bundles a great deal of music-related software in Release 2.0 Extended, though most of it is not music applications
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\i0 . The Music Kit
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\f0\fs28 is an extensive development tool for programmers; see the NeXT documentation. There are some bundled music demos that can be used by non-programmers, such as ScorePlayer, which can be launched by double-clicking the scorefiles in /NextLibrary/Music/Scores, or the demo program /NextDeveloper/Demos/Ensemble. (Ensemble is new in 2.0, replacing the 1.0 demo Synthesizer.) Ensemble combines MIDI in and out with DSP synthesis, soundfile playback, real-time algorithmic composition, interactive note processing, and more. See its on-line help for details. \
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In the /NextDeveloper/Examples directory, the MusicKit, MidiDriver, Sound, and SoundEditor subdirectories contain programs that are runnable by anyone who knows enough Unix to change directories and compile in a shell window. The source for Ensemble is included in the MusicKit examples directory. (Suggestion: copy anything in /NextDeveloper to your home directory before compiling or editing. Also see NextAnswers sound.350.) \
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\fc1 IRCAM in Paris has created an extensive software environment for real-time music synthesis and performance using the IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation, a signal-processing board based on two i860 chips and manufactured by Ariel. The software is free and is available from the Stanford archive server (see below), but it requires the board to run. The software includes:\
\pard\tx520\tx1060\tx1600\tx2120\tx2660\tx3200\tx3720\tx4260\tx4800\tx5320\fc1 • The MAX graphical programming environment, which allows you to graphically connect different real-time modules to create musical algorithms. Unlike the Macintosh version, the new NeXT version allows you to create not only MIDI data, but also digital signals on the i860 board. The board can be used as a synthesizer or sampler with real-time pitch-tracking and sophisticated sound processing.\
• A spectrogram editor that lets you draw outlines on a frequency-domain plot of a soundfile and filter the sound so that you hear only the selected parts. \
• Animal, an IB-like application with which you can lay out sounds on a music keyboard as a function of key number and key velocity. \
• Faster Than Sound (FTS), a program that manages event and sound scheduling, MIDI processing, and other communication tasks.\
• An array-processing library of hand-coded number-crunching routines for the i860.\
• A real-time, multitasking operating system for the i860, with a UNIX-like API. \
Ariel is also shipping another board with five DSP56001's, called the QuintProcessor. In the future, the Music Kit will talk transparently to QuintProcessors, providing another powerful real-time synthesis engine. Common Lisp Music, mentioned below, can already make use of any QuintProcessors that are installed.\
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Some public-domain software is available on the Internet archive servers. Z-quencer is a simple MIDI sequencer with the music displayed in piano-roll style (rather than as music notation). Looching is a program that plays continuous background music on the DSP. Programmers at NeXT created the Lisp Scorefile Package, a Lisp front end for generating Music Kit scorefiles, and RecordApp, a program for sound recording. (See NextAnswers misc.227 for instructions on obtaining software from archive servers.)\
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Also available for programmers are some environments for software (non-real-time) sound synthesis and soundfile processing, mostly ported from other Unix platforms. Some also do real-time DSP synthesis. Generally these are available with source for a nominal fee or free of charge. CSound was created at M.I.T. and was given a NeXT front end by Pete Yadlowsky (pmy@virginia.edu). F. Richard Moore at U. C. San Diego (frm@sdcarl.ucsd.edu) has ported cmusic, a software synthesis language, and pvoc, a phase vocoder (for sophisticated analysis and resynthesis of recorded sound). Paul Lansky at Princeton ported cmix and rtmix, programs for soundfile processing and mixing. John Rahn at the University of Washington (jrahn@blake.washington.edu) has a Lisp kernel for music composition. Mara Helmuth (mara@woof.columbia.edu) wrote Patchmix, a graphical unit generator patch program that helps you construct synthesis instruments and that writes out cmix code. \
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At Stanford University, Heinrich Taube has created Common Music, a compositional environment based on the Common Lisp Object System; it creates scorefiles, soundfiles, and DSP synthesis using the Music Kit. Bill Schottstaedt has developed Common Lisp Music, a Lisp-based software synthesis language that uses the DSP for acceleration rather than real-time synthesis. Perry Cook has written SPASM, an interactive vocal synthesis application, ResonatorLab, a real-time digital filter application, and miscellaneous other tools that can be used by non-programmers. Glen Diener is developing a music notation program. Bill Schottstaedt has made available another music notation package, called cmn, in which editing is done from Lisp rather than graphically. The Stanford materials are available by anonymous ftp to ccrma.stanford.edu.\
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At Northwestern University, Bill Parod (bill_parod@nwu.edu) has created Just, a NeXT Music Kit application for exploring tuning systems and for retuning scorefiles.\
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There is an extension to TeX for music notation called MuTeX. See NextAnswer misc.390 for ftp sites that have MuTeX. We are told this works with the NeXT version of TeX, but that it doesn't include 92dpi screen fonts, so you have to print the scores on your printer to see the notation. Presumably someone could use TeX's companion program METAFONT, also bundled on NeXT's 2.0 Extended software release, to create a 92dpi screen font from the provided MuTeX fonts.\
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Note that there are non-NeXTstep programs available for other platforms that might run on NeXT computers under SoftPC or X. For example, SCORE is a powerful music notation program for the IBM PC, and there are some public-domain sound tools that run under X windows. \
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There is an email-based music interest group that occasionally has announcements of new music-related software for the NeXT. To subscribe, send email to next-music-request@wri.com.\
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QA571\
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Valid for 1.0\
Valid for 2.0\
(Some of the software mentioned may not work under both releases.)\
