In view of what this thread has brought to light I would like to point out that there seems to be some confusion between:
1. Playing Music in the way that Hypercard did: http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CC/SW/HyperCard/TeachHC/hcsound/hcmusic.html 2. Playing Music by manipulating sound files imported into Runtime Revolution via play audioClip and 3. Playing Music by reading Midi files. My initial interest was in type 1; and remains so, as I feel it is the way that allows the most control via coding over PITCH, LOUDNESS and DURATION. The fact that Runtime Revolution appears to contain these capabilities seems to contradict the claim that Scott Rainey did not make proviso for this possibility. To reiterate, a quick 'poke' in the RR Documentation reveals this: beepDuration beepLoudness beepPitch which were introduced in version 1.0. However, these terms seem to be 'quiescent' insofar as they are ineffective under something like 99% of the operating systems used by RR Developers. Indeed, if I type 'beep' into my Message Box and press Enter, nothing happens! Now, I may be a bit naive, BUT my BBC Master is some 20 years old, and has 96 Kb RAM: in other words, it is positively Neolithic (well, that is a bit metaphorical as it is made from Plastic and Metal, and not Stone). However, it possesses 4 sound channels; all part of the physical capabilities of the hardware. In our "modern" age (one of the words I dislike most is 'modern') we have computers that are vastly more powerful and capable than my 'toy' computer. Surely, even if "modern" computers don't have hard-wired sound channels, they can be manipulated via software to produce the same effect??????????? ------------------------------------------------------------------ It is, frankly, an easy, albeit tedious, piece of work to churn out individual sound files from some program that produces notes (c.f. Sibelius) for each semitone on the musical scale; and then import them into a stack, and then code to play audioClips. The end result would be a clunky great bit of software using extremely inelegant and clumsy code that would produce something quite different from what Hypercard can do. This is not leveraging some inbuilt capability of Runtime Revolution, but an unsatisfactory fudge. The same could be said about add-ons or plug-ins. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Being a bit b*tchy, I see that Runtime Revolution is making a "big thing" about improved graphic capabilities in version 3.0: http://www.runrev.com/whats-new/graphics-enhancements/ which is jolly nice; although, I, for one, am convinced anyone who really wants some halfway decent graphics is going to do that work outwith Runtime Revolution. It would seem that digital note production is quite a bit more 'primitive' than 'jolly graphics'; and, as such (as well as Runtime Revolution's claim to be able to cope with HC stacks), should be a given. ---------------------------------- sincerely, Richmond Mathewson. ____________________________________________________________ A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle. ____________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
