An offhand comment in the group reminded me today of all the digitized
piano rolls Terry Smythe has made available, which I think I have all
of. These MIDI files work well in conjunction with the VanBasco Karaoke
program, which plays the tunes and shows a simple player piano keyboard
as it does. This program seems to be available only for PC-type
computers, and I've gradually shifted most of my activity over to a Mac
laptop. This brings me to some questions:
1) Has VanBasco ever been ported over to the Mac OS? I'd love to start
watching some of these again.
2) Has anybody made a MIDI player for the Mac that shows a keyboard as
it goes? That would be almost as good, perhaps even fully as good.
3) The big one: Has anybody ever made a MIDI player (with or without
the keyboard display, but better with) for the iPod? I could store
every single piano roll in one of my players and it wouldn't even make
a ripple in the water, so to speak. So many of these files are 4k each,
and they're only that big because that's the minimum file size. It's
been suggested that I can convert the files, one by one, to mp3, but
this makes them as big as any other mp3 file, and kills the advantage
of the tiny file size (and would also make a keyboard display
impossible).
Does anybody have the answer to #3? I have a spare iPod I'd love to
dedicate to my piano roll MIDIs. Even if I wanted to dedicate all the
space on it to mp3s of them, it would take forever to convert them all.
Kip Williams
Pittsford, New York, USA
|