Re: max and director

Richard Povall (richard.povall@oberlin.edu)
Thu, 11 Feb 1999 21:25:54 -0500

>I wish I could help more with this, but I'm eagerly awaiting the answer--I
>remember when Mark Coniglio did a residency here in Madison he showed us an
>Xtra for getting Director to take in and utilize MIDI, but that was for
>Director 4.0. I don't know if it will work with D6, but make sure you get the
>updated (6.1 or 6.02, I don't remember which) that will prevent some serious
>bugs. I'm sure Mark will be on here shortly with some more accurate info.
>

There is still not (to my knowledge anyway) an Xtra that really deals well
with MIDI in/out. You have to resort to the older XFCNS. Search for some
software called "HyperMIDI". It's a set of resources that you can
instantiate within Director that will, in a very ugly way, handle incoming
MIDI. You have to filter the data to get anything meaningful out of it.

HyperMIDI used to be free, but last time I looked, it wasn't.

Sorry I don't have the address to hand, but there is a website.

>While we're on the subject, today I began planning the tech aspect of a
>concert
>to be given by Jin-Wen Yu involving Big Eye. This is, I believe, a more
>simple
>version of what Jacques is doing, yet putting OMS and the latest demo of Big
>Eye on my Powerbook 1400 (with a G3 card hiding inside) seems to cause nothing
>but problems. I recall a year or so ago when playing around with OMS that it
>caused some problems with my system--should I be running minimal extensions
>while MIDIfying things, or are there bugs in Big Eye that I don't know about?

BigEye can misbehave, but I've used it with pretty much all flavour of
machine, including G3s, and with QT3 installed. I haven't tried to use it
on my PowerBook though, because I don't have video in. It could quite
possibly be the processor upgrade card that's causing the problems though.

BigEye isn't exactly buggy, but it's definitely a little recalcitrant
sometimes. I did have one machine where it crashed constantly - but I
never did figure out why.

PS If you're by any chance running System 7.6, that's probably the cause.

r

R i c h a r d P o v a l l
Director, Div. of Contemp. Music/Assoc. Prof of Computer Music/New Media.
Visiting Researcher, Exeter College of Art & Design, Exeter, UK.
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