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The Power of DirectMusic Producer

DirectMusic Producer is an authoring tool used to create music and other sounds for computer games and other applications.

You can use DirectMusic Producer in a number of ways, ranging from quickly setting up the playback of an existing MIDI file to creating a wholly new piece of music or sound effect. You can also use DirectMusic Producer to create a complete performance of music and sound effects that follows your settings for timing, length, start and stop times, instrument use, and other parameters.

The following are some of the capabilities of DirectMusic Producer:

Importing and Creating Audio Data

Audio data in a DirectMusic Producer segment can come from several different sources. You can obtain data in the following ways:

Variability

DirectMusic Producer gives you many options for incorporating variability into soundtracks. As a piece plays, there are multiple possible paths it can follow, including different chord choices, alternative melodies or sound effects, changes in rhythm, and increased or decreased intensity.

Interactivity

You can use DirectMusic Producer to design soundtracks that are linked to events or states in an application.

For example, the appearance of a villain in a CD-ROM game might be accompanied by a particular musical theme; the musical patterns in the theme could vary depending on the circumstance, such as a game character being in peril.

As another example, a multimedia CD-ROM about international travel could have a different style of music accompany each region or city, with smooth transitions from one style to another as the user explores. In addition, each mouse click could have a special sound effect or motif dedicated to it.

Unified and Exact Timing

All sounds are on a single timeline, no matter how many files you combine. Timing is very precise. You can cue sounds to occur at a given clock time, or at the nearest appropriate boundary such as at the beginning of a measure.

Complete Control over Instrumentation

DirectMusic Producer files support the Downloadable Sounds (DLS) Level 2 standard. You can make use of the power of DLS to ensure that instruments sound exactly the same on every playback system.

DLS frees you from the limitations of MIDI hardware. You are no longer restricted to a fixed set of timbres. An instrument can play any sound, even a nonmusical sound effect.

Scripting

Using DirectMusic Producer scripts, you can have more immediate control over the performance of sound in an application. Changes in a script take immediate effect, without the necessity of recompiling the application.


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