MidiShare is a multi-platforms musical operating system developed since 1989 by the
Grame's Computer Music Research Laboratory. Originally developed on the Macintosh,
then adapted to different platforms, it is now available on GNU/Linux since a few time
under the LGPL license.
Based on a client/server model, the main services provided by MidiShare are among the
following:
- High level musical events
Fully structured and time stamped with a millisecond resolution. These events include
both the MIDI and the MIDIFile typologies. They are in charge of the memory manager,
specially designed to optimize efficiency.
- An efficient scheduler
In charge of delivering events at their falling dates to the communication manager.
The scheduling algorithm ensures a very low and constant time overhead per event, even
when the scheduler is heavily loaded.
- Inter-applications communication
A communication manager routes the events to the client applications, according to the
connection set between them. This connection set can be dynamically configured by the
users.
- Real-time tasks
To control the real-time behavior of an application. Function calls can be scheduled
in the future and are automatically achieved by MidiShare at interrupt level
- Real-time alarms
Incoming MidiShare events as well as global context changes (new clients starting a
session, modifications of the connections between applications, etc.) can be
processed in real-time by user defined alarms.
The MidiShare development kits are freely available on the Internet. The MidiShare API
is fully documented. Two additional libraries are also provided to facilitate the
development of musical applications: a MIDI files management library and a Player
library intended to develop multi-tracks sequencers.
Several mailing lists are also available:
- midishare-dev for development support
- midishare-lib for midishare libraries development
- midishare-kernel for kernel development discussion
you can reach them at mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
MidiShare is currently used for many projects at Grame, but also for several others
projects on MacOS and Windows platforms (OpenMusic from IRCAM on the MacOS, MusicSpace
from SONY on Windows, ...). We hope to see them soon on Linux, as well as new specific
projects.
The MidiShare source code is LGPL. It is available using ftp or cvs.
For more information see at http://www.grame.fr/MidiShare/
For the open source project see http://www.grame.fr/MidiShare/SCPP
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Dominique Fober <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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GRAME - Centre National de Creation Musicale -
9 rue du Garet 69001 Lyon France
tel:+33 04 720 737 00 fax:+33 04 720 737 01
