OS/2 eZine

16 October 2000
 
Christopher B. Wright is the Editor in Chief of OS/2 eZine, a title he tried to duck for many months with little success. When he's not working on OS/2 eZine (what? he's not supposed to have any other jobs!) he works on his web comic strip, Help Desk.


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Midi Station Sequencer

In one of my many other secret lives, I am a musician who records his music on his computer and distributes it over the internet in the mp3 format (on sites like MP3.com, Listensmart.com, MusicBuilder.com, etc.)

For quite some time, home studio recording meant that you either bought some very, very expensive hardware, or you had an Atari, a Mac, or a Windows machine. Having no really epensive equipment, Atari, or Mac, I have a Windows partition on my workstation that I use as my primary mutlimedia recording studio.

Lately, however, this has been turning around. Christopher Hodges has created a truly interesting program called Midi Station Sequencer, which is -- you guessed it -- a Midi sequencing program for OS/2. With the release of version 2, however, it became more than that -- it can also record audio tracks. Suddenly, OS/2 has the ability to record both MIDI and audio tracks. Could it be that I could start recording my music on my favorite operating system?

Even more recently, alpha versions of the next release of Midi Station Sequencer have appeared on Hobbes -- and they promise to offer even more functionality than 2.0. 2.0 is the latest official release, however, and the next series of articles will deal with using it as a computer-based recording studio.

Part One: Installation

The most difficult part of using Midi Station Sequencer is installing it. Not because the install program itself is difficult to use, it's actually quite straightforward, butrather because Midi Station Sequencer depends on your sound card being able to use the RTMIDI drivers for OS/2 in order to properly record MIDI tracks. What is RTMIDI? Simply put, it's a high resolution driver that allows OS/2 to play and record MIDI tracks with a very high degree of precision -- more precision, in fact, than is available on other platforms (like Windows). Unfortunately, getting a sound card to actually use RTMIDI is something of a herculean effort. If you happen to have a Crystal TidalWave 128 ISA card, you're in luck, because RTMIDI works perfectly on it. If you happen to have the MMPack that Thetaband Software sells, you might also be in luck, because the MMPack includes an installer that greatly increases the chance of RTMIDI working with your sound card, whatever it might be. If you have a Creative Labs sound card, your luck will be greatly reduced -- Creative abandoned the OS/2 market a long time ago, and while there is a project on OS/2 Netlabs underway to port the Linux drivers for the latest Creative soundcard over to OS/2, it is still an alpha release and does not support RTMIDI.

If you have a PCI sound card, chances are not good that you will be able to use Midi Station Sequencer for MIDI sequencing. The only PCI sound cards that I know of with any kind of OS/2 support are ones using the Crystal chipset -- and even then, success has been inconsistent. In my own case, I was able to get a Crystal-based PCI card to play sound, but I could never get it to use the MIDI port at all. Some people have have more success, some less.

This is by far the biggest hurdle to using this application, and unfortunately it's not really something the developer can do anything about. If you can get your sound card to recognize RTMIDI, you're over the biggest hurdle, and can start playing with the application.

Exploring Midi Station Sequencer

When you launch Midi Station Sequencer for the first time, you are introduced to the two main windows


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