Re: [OT] Mutitimbral - philosophy
Re: [OT] Mutitimbral - philosophy
- Subject: Re: [OT] Mutitimbral - philosophy
- From: James Chandler Jr <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 10:36:27 -0700
On Thursday, July 17, 2003, at 12:47 AM, Urs Heckmann wrote:
If commercial OSX softsynths do not typically support standalone
operation via virtual MIDI ports, somebody might make some money
selling a simple VirtualMIDIPort MusicDevice host?
Look at RAX. It makes any Music Device a stand alone application. Best
of all, you can start as many instances as you want and add effects.
Virtual Midi ports are provided by iMIDI.
Hi Urs
Thanks for the tip, will do. Sounds great.
It occasionally comes to mind that a sophisticated real-time softsynth
host could be a powerful tool for live gigging. Carry just a couple of
keyboards and a computer rather than a rack of synthesizers.
Granted one could get "close to" the same behavior forcing a sequencer
to the task, but a specialized tool might work better. Something like a
sophisticated preset mapper, plus softsynth and effects hosting, plus
notation/lyrics display and set management.
The trio I still occasionally work with, plays out of a book with
hundreds of hand-written fake sheets. It would probably be a lot easier
to scan all those pages rather than laboriously re-type them into
computer format.
A program that displays scanned fake sheets (or computer-generated pdf
equivalent), and automatically sets up patches, mapping and effects for
each song, might be a real labor-saver on a conventional non-sequenced
gig. Especially if the UI is elegant enough to very quickly configure
the next set list (out of a list of hundreds of songs) in just a couple
of minutes on a break.
Have been tempted to write such for my own use, but the issue is if
there are enough musicians who still play live, to make such a product
viable. Unless I go back to full-time musician, it wouldn't make sense
to write something that big for personal use a few times a month.
Its bad enough knowing that system software updates will soon enough
kill off softsynth and sequencer investments.
Have I missed anything?
Progress marches on. In the long term, its all money down a pit.
That said, MIDI synths bought in 1985 returned longer-term on the
"investment" than MIDI software purchased in 2001. It would be nice to
think that music software purchased in 2003 will still operate properly
on a 2005 computer, but it is difficult to have faith (GRIN).
Buying short-term-disposable stuff, one must consider whether profits
will amortize cost before the gadgets are obsolete. Unless you are
getting rich as a rock star, return-on-investment factors will diminish
the amount one is willing to pay for short-lived gadgets.
That's one concern reading folks' rush to abandon MIDI data
representation for "more elegant" internal computer representations.
Might be risky putting a ton of effort into very short-lived file
formats.
There are songs I eventually need to archaeologically recover that were
saved in my old 1991 GMS sequencer format, to say nothing of the song
folder full of Vision files (GRIN). Yep, should have saved backup MIDI
files on EVERYTHING.
James Chandler Jr.
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