Technical Q&A's

QTW 79 - Mixing Music Tracks (21-August-96)

Q I am playing four QuickTime movies simultaneously from a Director project. Each ot the movies has a single music track with no other video or sound tracks, and two of the movies use more than one instrument. The Director project allows the user to control the volume level of each of movie independently. The application works great on the Mac with QuickTime 2.1, but on the PC with QuickTime 2.11, only one music track plays at a time and the notes from the other movies seem to buffer up.

Is it possible to hear all 4 music tracks at once under QuickTime for Windows 2.11?

A You can do live mixing of your four QuickTime movies only if your Windows system has four MIDI output devices. Most systems have only one. All Windows applications suffer from this limitation unless they are clever enough to mix the tracks on the fly, but I don't know of any that can actually do this.

For now, you must pre-mix the four music tracks from the four movies into one music track in one movie. You will not be able to do the live mixing unless you write your own MIDI sequencer.

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