A.M.P is a simple application that plays any MIDI file on the Macintosh itself or on an external synthesizer. Just drag and drop a MIDI file on its icon or its window and the song is playing !
A.M.P. needs a Mac LC + system 7 (or better) + QuickTime 2 or the Apple MIDI Manager extensions.
You can use either QuickTime Music (to play to the internal speaker) or the MIDI Manager (to play on real external MIDI device).
Quick start
• At startup in the first dialog you can choose between 2 methods for sending MIDI commands:
- through Apple MIDI Manager. In this case you need the Midi Manager extension, PatchBay and the Apple MIDI Driver.
If you use a Yamaha PSS780 synthesizer , check the box “Yamaha PSS780 mode” (If you need another program translation, please tell me.)
- by using QuickTime Music . You need the QuickTime (2.0 or better) extension and the QuickTime Musical Instruments extension. The number of sounds that can be played at the same time depends on your computer speed. On my LC, I can have only 6 channels. AMP tries to open channel 10 first, then channel 1, 2, ...
• You can open any MIDI file by dragging its icon on the main window of A.M.P or on its icon in the Finder. If a song is playing when you drop a file, it is stopped and the new file is opened.
You can change instruments and disable channels with popups. In the main window the notes are hilited and the pitch bends move in real time on the 16 channels. Click on the keyboards to play yourself (but it is not very easy and it is not the goal of this program!).
Notes
- A.M.P. works also in background.
- If you try to open a corrupted MIDI file, your system might crash. However the program knows if a file is not a MIDI file, so it won't crash when you try to open a text file for example.
- MIDI files don't have to be of type 'MIDI' and can have any Finder type, even if it may be useful to give them AMP signature so that they can be opened with double-click.
