24 - MIDI Instruments

Abstract

This chapter describes adding MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) instruments to QuickTime movie. A sprite movie with lots of rich animation is very small in size, while producing the same visual effects with video would often take up many times more space, even when highly compressed. MIDI does the same thing for audio. QuickTime comes with a large variety of software instruments that have pretty good sound. They are many times better than the first MIDI computers that came out in the late 1980s. Besides playing back a musical score, scripts that interactively play MIDI instruments can be built. To script MIDI, one or more instruments have to be added to the movie. This can be done by adding an instrument track. One instrument track can contain several instrument definitions. QuickTime has a standard set of built-in instruments defined by the General MIDI specification (GM), including flutes, horns, stringed instruments, percussion, and sound effects. QuickTime allows adding new instruments from sampled sound files. The chapter describes how to work with sampled sound instruments and how to add an instrument track to a movie. How to play a single note to add sound to QuickTime creations is described as well.