130 MIDI Tool Box/130 MIDI Tool Box.iso/midikap/music.txt

Text File | 1992-06-08 | 6KB | 101 lines

        Well, here it is, my first piece of software to ever leave my house.
For those of you without Windows 3.1, it's time to shell out the $50 for the
upgrade.  It's very well worth it.  I've had it for about 2 weeks, and I don't
miss Unrecoverable Application Errors a bit.  Nice and stable.  But the best
thing of all is the multimedia player that it comes with.  With it, and
the proper hardware (AdLib, SoundBlaster, or Roland MPU-401 MIDI) you can
play back the files created with my MidiKap program.  (And being a CS student
living about 10 miles north of Microsoft, I have to put in an advertisement.)
Thanks to the beauty of Windows, you can keep the Multimedia Player running
in the background, then just switch back and forth to MidiKap with Alt-Tab.
Do be sure to save the file in MidiKap first, then re-open it in the
Multimedia Player.  That's a bit of the interface to be improved soon.
Most of all, I wanted to get something out in netland to start getting feedback.

    This project has been stagnant since about April, but in
June I'll be able to continue on it.  The major improvements planned
include:
    Speed, especially in scrolling across the screen
    Adding dotted notes
    Allowing "accidentals" or notes out of key
    Changing the key of a song already entered
    Printing out a song
    Adding lyrics
    Implementing archaic music notation (more on that later)
    Anything else suggested to me by beta testers (like you!)

    I'm using a MusicQuest MIDI card in a DTK 386/25.  I also use an AdLib
card with very cheap speakers and get good results.

About the program:
    I hope it's not too hard to figure out how it works, but here are
some instructions to get you started:

    Along the bottom of the screen you will find a row of tools. The
ones that look like music notes allow you to add notes to the song.  Click
once on the tool and it will be highlighted in grey, and your mouse
pointer will become a box inside a box.  To add a note, simply click on
the staff where you would like it.  You can do this as many times as
you like.  Then to choose another note, just pick the appropriate tool.
As you move up and down the staff, the box in the bottom right is showing
what note would be entered if you clicked there.  This is quite handy if
you have trouble seeing where you are on the tiny staff lines.  You will
notice that the notes added are not the classical notation style, but a
more logical system.  The rectangles show both where a note starts and
where it ends.  I like this system better, do you?
    The File menu should be familiar to users of Windows applications.
Open, Save, and New do the appropriate operation on a song file.  I've
included a few sample songs to play with.  I didn't write these songs, but
I entered them from sheet music.  WARNING!  The File Exit option does NOT
prompt you to save the song before exiting (yet).  Be sure to save before
choosing Exit.  Another thing to note is that I have tried to make the
program load and save MIDI standard 1.0 files.  Please let me know if you
have any files from other programs (such as CakeWalk) that do or don't
open up correctly in my program.
    The Edit menu allows copying and clearing of measures.  When a
measure is cleared, the notes in it are removed, and the measure is
left blank.  The Delete Measures option (coming soon) will clear a
measure and move all the following measures left.  To use the copy and
delete notes options, you must first highlight the notes with the hand
tool at the bottom (tool on the far right).  Select the tool, then each
note you click on will turn red.  (Hint: this works best if you click
toward the left side of the note.)  The Copy Notes and Delete Notes
operations will work on the notes you have highlighted in red.
    The Chords menu lets you conveniently add chords on the bass
clef.  Simply pick the root note for the chord, the structure (Major,
Minor, etc.) and the length (whole note, half note, etc.), then pick
OK.  Your mouse pointer will become four arrows going up/down/left/right
and now you can click each place you want the chord.  This is similar to
adding notes, but notice that you need only worry about the left to right
position of the chord, as the vertical placement on the staff is done
automatically.  To get rid of the chord tool, just pick any other tool
along the bottom.
    The Parameters menu lets you set three things: Tempo, Time Signature,
and Quantization.  Quantization refers to the way the program aligns the
notes you enter.  Basically, if you set it to eighth note quantization, any
note or chord you add will be "rounded" to the nearest eighth note.
    The Key Signature menu, not surprisingly, allows you to set the
key signature of the song.  This will affect any notes you enter after
setting it, not the ones already added.
    The key signature, like the tempo and time signature are saved with your
file, so they will still be set the next time you open the file.  The
Multimedia Player also seems to observe these settings when it plays back.
I must admit my ear isn't good enough yet to hear if the key signature is
correct.

    Speaking of ear training, my next project is a kind of ear training
program,using MIDI to output notes at random, letting you guess what it was.  It
will start out with just two notes, far apart.  Once you can distinguish the C
from an F, it will maybe add an A.  I hear this is how some ear training courses
work, and once that's done, it'll also appear at CICA.


    Hope you like it.  Please send feedback (mild flames OK) to

[e-mail]



Disclaimer:  I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything.

Disclaimer for the Disclaimer:  I didn't write that disclaimer.