QuickTime Music Architecture

Overview

This chapter describes the QuickTime music architecture (QTMA), which allows QuickTime movies, applications, and other software to play individual musical notes, sequences of notes, and a broad range of sounds from a variety of instruments and synthesizers. With QTMA, you can also import Standard MIDI files (SMF) and convert them into a QuickTime movie for easy playback.

Because the QTMA is component-based and implemented as Component Manager components, your application can take advantage of a number of QTMA components for extensibility. For example, you can use the QuickTime music synthesizer, which is a software-based music synthesizer included with QuickTime, to generate sounds or music out of a computer's built-in speaker. You can also use the General MIDI component for playing music on a General MIDI device attached to a serial port.

Before reading this chapter, you should already be familiar with QuickTime and QuickTime components. In order to create or use any component, your application must use the Component Manager. If you are not familiar with the Component Manager, see Chapter 6 of Inside Macintosh: More Macintosh Toolbox.

You need to read this chapter if you are writing an application that creates QuickTime movies and you want to incorporate music tracks as part of the movie, either by importing MIDI files or by programmatically generating musical sequences. If you want to create a music component or add an instrument to the existing library of instruments, you also need to read this chapter. These capabilities are explained in the section "Using the QuickTime Music Architecture" . If you are creating new instruments, you should be familiar with QT atoms and atom containers, which are described in "QT Atoms" in this Reference guide.

Finally, this chapter contains an extensive reference section, "QuickTime Music Architecture Reference" , which describes the constants, data types, and functions of QTMA.