Miles Sound System SDK 7.2a

MIDIECHO for Windows - MIDI Data Receiver and Interpreter

Discussion

The MIDIECHO for Windows program receives incoming MIDI Channel Voice and System Exclusive messages via a standard Windows midiIn driver, and sends them to a specified Miles Sound System Extended MIDI (XMIDI) driver.

MIDIECHO is a valuable resource for musicians who wish to develop music and sound-effects arrangements for MSS applications. Composers can receive immediate feedback when developing IBM-specific XMIDI compositions on a Macintosh or Atari ST-based MIDI sequencer platform, simply by connecting the host's MIDI interface to a reasonable-quality MIDI interface on a "slave" PC system running MIDIECHO.

When starting MIDIECHO, you must choose the capture and playback options.

You can choose the drivers for MIDI input, MIDI output, and digital output. Digital output is used for the software synthesizer and digital trigger sound effects with wave library files (now obsolete - you should use DLS for all future digital sample triggering). You can also choose the DLS Provider DLL to use - use MSS32.DLL for the software synthesizer, S3BASE.DLL for Sonic Vibes DLS hardware, or VORT_DLS.DLL for Aureal Vortex DLS hardware.

Once you've made all of your choices, click the Start MIDI Echo button, and the main MIDI Echo text window will appear. When playing complicated MIDI sequences, the display may fall behind the MIDI music - to avoid this, simply press Alt-Enter to switch the screen to full-screen text mode.

When MIDIECHO is running, the + and - keys may be used to adjust the "voice alert limit," or the number of notes which MSS assumes the synthesizer in use can play simultaneously. During a MIDI performance, MIDIECHO presents a continuously-updated graphical display of polyphonic note activity. When the voice alert limit is exceeded, the portion of the bar graph to the right of the limit indicator will be shown in bright red, and the "total overflows" indicator above the graph will be incremented. This feature may be helpful when diagnosing note "dropout" problems that occur due to partial overflow.

When running on slower PC platforms with dense MIDI traffic, MIDIECHO may exhibit undesirable tempo variations due to program overhead. If this problem occurs, the T key can be used to disable the continuously scrolling MIDI event trace which appears in MIDIECHO's uppermost window.

The A key (All Notes Off) can be pressed at any time to "kill" any stuck notes which may occur while running MIDIECHO.

During playback, if a combination of XMIDI Patch Bank Select controller and MIDI Program Change number values is used to set up a timbre which cannot be found in the specified Global Timbre Library file, MIDIECHO will complain with an error message. The E key can be used to enable or disable a beep tone from the PC speaker when note overflow occurs, or when instrument-loading errors are reported.

The F key (Filter) can be pressed to toggle the software synthesizer's filtering mode.

The R key (Reverb) can be pressed to toggle the software synthesizer's reverb mode.

MIDIECHO re-transmits incoming data on all 16 MIDI channels to the MSS driver via the AIL_send_channel_voice_message call. The program retransmits all MIDI Channel Voice messages. (MIDI System Exclusive messages are retransmitted as well, but this feature should be used with caution since "timing slips" inherent in System Exclusive transmission can cause strange, misleading effects in the music).

MIDIECHO is intended to receive normal MIDI Channel Voice data, not synthesizer-ready XMIDI data. Timing problems may occur if a dense XMIDI data stream (as from a Miles Sound System application or the MSS Version 2.0 CAKEPORT driver) is fed to the MIDIECHO host's input port.

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Group: Miles Sound System Tools Reference
Related Sections: MIDIECHO for DOS - MIDI Data Receiver and Interpreter, MIDIECHO for MacOS - MIDI Data Receiver and Interpreter
Related Functions: AIL_send_channel_voice_message