Re: Where to find a OS X mid overview
Re: Where to find a OS X mid overview
- Subject: Re: Where to find a OS X mid overview
- From: Robert Grant <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2003 12:56:05 -0500
Hi Dave,
Well you and the rest of us. We're waiting for Doug to come down from
the mount with the middev & midnam tablets ;-)
So it's not really documented at the moment - all we have are the
midnam and middev document types available here:
http://www.midi.org/dtds/MIDIDeviceTypes10.dtd
http://www.midi.org/dtds/MIDINameDocument10.dtd
And some OMS->midnam converters:
http://www.sonosphere.com/MusicSoftware/MIDINames/
http://www.savagetranscendental.com/cherrypicker/
According to an SOS article by Robin Bigwood (Performer Notes) these
files are supposed to end up in
~/Library/Audio/MIDI Devices/Manufacturer
(actually Robin has them under ~/Library/Audio/MIDI
Devices/MOTU/Manufacturer but that surely is just a MOTU thing while
the standards are being sorted out. Certainly I wouldn't want my
standard midnam files to be duplicated under each DAWs folder!)
However Dave Eager has found a new folder that's appeared under Audio
called "MIDI Patch Names" (not on my system but possibly it got created
as part of a ProTools install)
He puts his middev files in MIDI Devices and his midnam files in MIDI
Patch Names and ProTools is happy.
So anyway, that confusion apart, the way it's supposed to work (I think
- and I often get corrected which is how I found out the right way ;-))
is the initial middev and midnam documents describe the factory state
of the MIDI Device and then when the banks and patches are changed this
factory midnam document is supposed to be modified to point to
overriding midnam documents. So the current set of patches in the
device is found by merging these files. I'm not sure how these
supplemental files are supposed to be managed as there is no patch
librarian at the moment that can handle midnam files (apart from
CherryPicker which seems MOTU oriented, but it can put it's midnam
files anywhere I think - but I just tried it with my Proteus midnam and
it didn't pick it up which makes it seem more like a converter than a
librarian which it probably is), but I imagine that you're supposed to
stick with one librarian and a bunch of users of the library, that are
able to do the merging. This is where the CoreMIDI support for midnam
comes in. CoreMIDI should be able to find the midnam file(s) for a
device if the device is configured with a Manufacturer name and a
Device name. It will also return the patch names in a plist for easy
processing. You can even modify the plist and set it back - but I'm not
sure how that's supposed to work if the overrides are supposed to be in
a separate midnam file?
By the way - even though I have created middev and midnam files for my
Proteus CoreMIDI is not able to retrieve them so I think there's still
work to be done behind the scenes and we're probably trying to run
before we can walk. But if DAWs are starting to use these files then
users are going to want to get the capabilities in all their MIDI apps,
so the pressure is starting to mount.
I've got rudimentary support in my app by ignoring the CoreMIDI support
for midnam and building my own midnam parser using XMLTree - I get the
patch names and the bank/program change info, so it looks very nice and
works well - but I'm sunk if there's an override document. :-)
Hope that helps,
Robert.
On Dec 6, 2003, at 10:59 AM, David Hage wrote:
Dear All,
I'm not a programmer, but I would like to get a overview of how midi is
working in OSX 10.3. Specifically the role that .midnam and .middev
files
take and how they interact with each other and in terms of midi
applications
and the audiomidi setup program. Could someone point me in the right
direction.
Many thanks
Regards
--
Dave Hage
Dakota Music Service Ltd
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