QuickTime Music Architecture

Introduction

The QuickTime Music Architecture (QTMA) 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 QuickTime movies 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 audio device. You can also use the General MIDI component for playing music on a General MIDI device attached to a serial port.