QuickTime 3 Reference
To use a new hardware or software synthesizer with the QuickTime music architecture, you need a music component that serves as a device driver for that synthesizer and that can play notes on the synthesizer. You can simplify the creation of a music component by using the services of the generic music component. To create an music component, you create several resources, for which you get much of the data by calling functions of the generic music component, and implement functions that the generic music component calls when necessary. When a music component is a client of the generic music component, it handles only a few component calls from applications and more relatively simple calls from the generic music component.