#: 9869 S2/Tutorials
    19-Mar-91  23:55:46
Sb: MFF1 to MFF0 help!
Fm: PaulSeniura 76476,464
To: all


I have a little bit of good news, if it holds up!  Someone has bothered to help
us make a Std MIDI File format converter based on the program he wrote for CP/M
on the Commodore Adam computers, written in "Small C" with some assembler for
speed and efficiency (I wonder why :-).  He's on CIS and I'll be checking once
in a while for something in my in-basket.  They've had such a program for some
time it turns out.  Everyone else seems to be keeping it a secret, cuz I have
asked 'til I'm blue in the face (*not* a reflection of the blue OS9 window I am
logged on with! :-).

Well, being the "realist" that I am -- "realistically pessemistic" -- I'm still
going to prepare myself to reinvent the wheel ONCE AGAIN . I am
uploading another article that requires all the expertises anyone here can
muster-up.

The help I need is OS9-specific and not really MIDI-specific at all.  I'm
thinking we can spawn subtasks that'd run copies of the same subroutine,
passing back SMF chunks of MIDI info inside the Format-1 tracks to the main
task for deciding how to sort the tracks together into a CMF output file.

I'm going to attempt a text drawing of what I mean and upload it.  If you can
help me, please download it.  It'll probably be too big to fit in a forum
message for CIS but maybe on Delphi it'd fit, eh?  I'll put it up on both, so
don't think you're seeing double!  Again it'll be for personal use only and I
again will thank you beforehand for your trouble in helping me!

I guess I'll call this article something like MF1TO0.ART for "MIDIfile Format-1
to -0 Article".  Please look for it.  I do hope the CP/M C sources will do the
job, but just in case it doesn't, this article will tell enough of what we'd
like to attempt to do.  Kinda new territory here.

If we can get this done, the *only* thing we have left to gripe about is that
we can't undo LHARC'd files, and some other formats like SIT, ZOO, etc., to get
access to SMFs around the world.

-- Thx, Paul Seniura.