John McClelland wrote:

> I'm not familiar with all the Macintosh programs and would like some
> ideas from readers regarding a similar program designed for the Mac --
> one that lets me view and edit the MIDI files in a piano roll format.
> I don't need fancy stuff and would prefer not to spend a lot of money
> for bells and whistles I'll never use.  Your suggestions are
> appreciated.

If you can run "classic," my favorite program is called MIDIGraphy
(by Tontata).  There is no better program that I found.  This program
seems to be 'abandoned-ware' and has not had any updates since 1999.

Several years ago I purchased "SmartScore" MIDI edition.  This is more
of a sheet music scanning program.  It is somewhat useful for a quick
look at a file.  The playback does not work well as they are attempting
to shift too much graphic data on the screen.

I also wrote a CIS viewer and editor converter program.  See at
http://www.delectra.com/rolltransport/ (scroll to the bottom, it is
called "maddelena".)   I was able to compile this under Mac OS 10.5.
The MIDI playback has been changed to be more iPod & iPad friendly and
no longer works.  (I think the online version is still the old one for
"classic."  I never completed it.)

By chance I have been working on re-writing something that is based on
the MIDIGraphy program; I'm not sure how long it will take or what time
I will have to work on it.  A few weeks back there were some questions
regarding bell registrations on APP rolls, which got me interested in
fixing some sort of program.  Since MIDIGraphy was written in both
Japanese and English it is easy to reverse engineer the structures and
re-write them using the latest Macintosh interfaces.  These are now
called APPs.

A problem I have had with Midiboek, Noteur and other similar program
is that few of these handle lock and cancel or multiplexed registers.
These are, in effect, a many-to-one mapping where the same tracker port
can play several MIDI voices.

I have also been researching MIDI XML (a sub version of MusicXML) and
looking a bit at the surface of a notation library called Lillypond.
This may be too technical for interest here.  I still like the ABC
notation, and while that gets a bit of traffic on the mailing list,
it seems to be a bit dated.

It may be that MIDI XML will replace the SMF file wrappers in the long
run.  Any program for editing MIDI will need an internal database.  It
is easy on Mac and Windows to read an XML stream into a SQL database
which can be used to show the piano roll (or score).  As an XML markup
document, it is also possible to share such files as part of a web page
where the user can either view the notes or listen to the music.

Most web pages use HTML which is a sub class of XML so there is a lot
of activity in this area.  I have been considering putting some of what
I have learned onto my blog as I re-work the MIDIGraphy program to use
modern programming methods.

Julie Porter