Re: [microsound] gear questions: unfortunate newbie pandering

[Michal Seta <mis@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> sequencers:
> in my quest to escape the mouse, i've looked into 
attaching external 
> sequencers to a computer, partly for the big rubber buttons,
> and partly for 
> the extra CPU power i get if i don't have something like cubase
> or logic 
> running in the background.

for low-cpu-usage sequencer (on a Mac) check MIDIGraphy (shareware). 
 It's great.


> 
> software:
> i'm not into mac, so i can't tackle this one. if you had a PC, a
> few things 
> come to mind (Audiomulch, PD/GEM...) but you have that 
covered with 
> soundhack and max/msp, i gather. this is something for
> you, though....

actually soundhack is very different from audiomulch.  Great 
app, nevertheless.


> midi 
> ox or hubi's loopback: allows midi apps to talk to each other
> inside your 
> machine. if you don't want to use an external sequencer, this
> can get MAX 
> and cubase shaking hands. these are PC programs, but maybe 
there is 
> something like this for a MAC, too. (maybe MACs are so godlike
> that they 
> don't need this kind of app. in which case, suggestion
> is retracted...)

Macs are so godlike.  Every OMS compatible app uses what's 
called IAC Bus (InterApplication Communication Bus).  If you 
use FreeMIDI you can use IAC in OMS emulation mode (I think...) 
and if you use OpenMIDI, they have a different way of 
communicating with the other apps (they also have OMS emulation, 
I think so IAC will work).  IF you use Max, you can build your 
own sequencer within and make it do exactly what you want.  No 
need to use external apps.  Depends on the 
situation/context/skill, though.

If you've got OSX (I assume you do) I would start getting into 
it, learning the system, installing compilers and stuff 
because there are tons of unix apps that are great for electro 
type of thing.  You will save some cash but often the learning 
curve is a bit higher than ready made commercial software.

And OSX has better performance and better latency times than 
he classic MacOS (and any OS for that matter 
- http://gigue.peabody.jhu.edu/~mdboom/latency-icmc2001.pdf) and 
it looks like it's here to stay and classic will eventually 
disapear so it's better to dive into it right away.  

HTH

../MiS