Music
Music on the web is rather strange and confused at this time. That's really
true of computers in general of course. There is no unified standard or
standards. Unix was the normal OS at the start of the web as it ran on
many different hardware vendor's machines. C and C++ were running on and
making the code for those systems and ANSI made standards for them to make
them more transportable. All that is fine, but how do we output music?
Most early systems just put a pair of DACs (Digital to Analog Convertors)
on IO ports and just sent a 'stream' of data to the port at either top
speed or a controlled speed. When I was at U.N.H. this what how we did
it, with a combination of assembly and C code routines to make the music.
That was in 1979, in the 1980's a standard called MIDI came out. This standard
is still changing and being worked on, but it includes standard formats
and hardware interfaces for music. Windows (all versions) uses it's own
version of this standard for it's .MID files (really a modified version
of the IFF .SMUS standard from EA [Electronic Arts]). The first MIDI device
to be popular on PCs was the MPU401, a MIDI pair of IO ports (IN &
OUT) for the MIDI hardware standard. That is why you see keyboard makers
in the MIDI MAP and sound devices areas of windows machines. After that
the ADLIB card came out, some with MPU401 clone ports on them. Next came
SB ( SoundBlaster) cards, SBPro, SB16, AWE32 and a host of others. PC sound
cards of today are versions of these cards or can be made to act like these
cards with software. The common addresses used by these cards are:
Base address of 220H (0x220 IRQ 5 DMA 1 & 5)
MIDI port at 330H (0x330 IRQ 9)
OPL3 port at 388H (0x388)
WTBL port at 620H (0x620) Truely there are other addresses (0x230 for
CDROM on old SBPro/SB16) that are important to know, but they aren't really
required to make music. Generally under Windows these addresses are setup
by software that came with the card or that Windows95 auto-detected. Under
Unix (in my case generally Linux), you need to know the values and plug
them in when you make your kernel. Linux has been dealing with sound cards
like these for the last few years and is getting quite good at it. There
are now RealAudio 2.0 & 3.0
'plugins' for Netscape running under most versions of Unix including Linux.
Of course this means there is also Netscape 2.0 and 3.0 available for these
machines from Netscape.
For music under many setups (not linux yet) try Crescendo!
For editiing I have started to use Noteworthy
Composer here's the first calssical quartet I did with it called ATune.
I did
rush the end instead of developing all the themes alone and in combination
(as the piece should) as it was 11pm and I
was getting tried after 2 hours of inputting the piece. Here's a much
older piece I did orginally on the Amiga and have now
re-coded for the PC: One Halloween
Morn (done one Halloween morning as if you couldn't guess).
Music Sites
The Doors
Mike Oldfield
Pink Floyd
MISC.