[ Kip Williams wrote in 110724 MMDigest:

> 1) Has VanBasco ever been ported over to the Mac OS?

A Google search shows that one has to run the karaoke player within a
Windows partition.  No indication that there is a native OS X version.

> I'd love to start watching some of these again.

I have been working on a program that will read and write the *.vpl
playlist files on a Mac.  I am also working on extending my file
players to read the same playlist files.

My goal is to take the large database of APP rolls and create the
playlists as rolls.  This way I can copy the same directory structure
to all my computers and file players.

VanBasco does store the file names as Windows path names.  It is
actually easy to read these and convert the separators to other
formats.  Mac now uses Unix style path names.


> 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.

MIDI Graphy does this for OS 9.  I have been working on porting this to
OS X or writing an equivalent program.

I bought the smart score sheet music scanning editing program.  It will
open the files as a piano roll view.  Playback on my 1.2 GHz Power PC
Mac Mini is not satisfactory as it tends to drop events and the bar
indicator is not accurate.

Probably because apple owns the MIDI data inside the closed system.
This means that program updates are only called when the system has
nothing else to do.  Most applications just send the MIDI file to the
QuickTime interface.  This used to be public, but with the popularity
of iTunes and iPhones apple has deprecated this and taking it back to
a private internal format.


> 3) The big one: Has anybody ever made a MIDI player (with or without
> the keyboard display, but better with) for the iPod?

The iPod is a closed system.  So there is no hardware interface that
can play the MIDI.  It is possible to load the MIDI files into iTunes.
This will convert them to audio files (the format depends on your
import setting. Usually this is MP3.)

> 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.

Conversion is automatic when the file is opened in iTunes.

I have been looking into learning more iOS programming.  Only last week
did apple release a serial interface cable.  Pressure from the android
OS.  I am still running on non Intel Macs so can not access the
latest developer tools.

Spend a lot of time last week looking for how apple wants new programs
to handle MIDI.  The old way of playing MIDI events through quick time
MIDI events has been deprecated.

This is to force programmers to use some libraries called Core Audio,
which have been around for a number of years.  There is not a lot of
sample code.  What code exists is not iOS friendly.

Personally I do not like core Audio since it treats the MIDI tracks the
same as digitized analog audio tracks and is more designed for mixing
than sequencing.  Most of the emphasis is on "Audio Graphs" and digital
signal processing filters, which entail some really advanced
mathematics.  It is a powerful system, which requires a high learning
curve and a lot of time investment.

MIDI playback is built into the OS.  So it is expected that users will
play or send MIDI through apple supplied programs like Garage band or
the high end mixing program apple sells to professionals.  I forget
what this is called.

I can run some of the developer tools which can build applications
that will run on the newer Intel OS operating systems.  I can not test
on them.  With the popularity of the iPhone/iPad there are more and
more tutorials.  Most which relate to the SQL database interface.  This
means that one can write a database app like iTunes or AppleMail.

So a playback app, using the VanBasco vpl files is practical.  At
least as far as sequencing.  It may not be as easy to display the piano
score or karaoke tracks.  If it is possible, I might have something in
six to eighteen months.  Depending on how much time I want to spend on
the project.

Julie Porter