Ben Kennedy wrote:
I've taken up that challenge and I hereby present a new build which now streams MTC during playback!
Wow, this _almost_ works! I'm not quite sure where the remaining hiccups are, so I'll describe my results. I finally got a chance to sneak home at lunchtime while the iBook was free, plug-in, and give this a go. I checked the settings on my deck to ensure it was set up to slave to DB, and everything looked good. I ran audio out from the iBook to the inputs on my deck and, to test levels, pressed play on DB. Sound duly came over my headphones, and the deck had clearly received a command from DB since it started play-back :) Perhaps a toggle on the interface to temporarily disable MMC/MTC output would be good, so one can check levels and such without issuing commands to your slaved hardware. But anyway, I primed the deck to record, and hit Play on DB again .... Behold! DB started audio and the deck started recording! Then, alas! After, I dunno, 10 seconds or so audio output pretty suddenly dropped out, though DB's interface continued to show the "cursor" advancing through the song and the deck kept playing. I tried this all again several times. Sometimes DB started audio output cleanly and then stalled at about the same point. Sometimes DB coughed and spat to get audio going, and then carried only cleanly for a bit to stall at the same point as always. A couple of times DB didn't seem to want to start audio output at all, though in all cases it started the deck going and the cursor always marched on stoicly even after audio output had fizzled. The way the audio output died was not _quite_ abrupt. It sounded to me as though the level slipped across the stereo in my headphones just as it was cutting out, though that could be an artifact of it always dying just at a point in the track where different things were happening on different sides of the stereo image. Still, its clear that the basics _are_ working, and I'm not quite sure where the problem lies. The iBook did have several other things going on with it besides DB, so possibly it was simply running low on RAM. I didn't have time to shut everything else down and try again with DB as the sole running app with me as the sole log-in. However, the iBook is a new G4 from earlier this year and packed with as much RAM as Apple would build into it. Yeah, I should try this again. But I'm not sure why the audio output packed in when everything else seemed to keep going. DB was clearly still finding its way through the song. But hey, whether there is some bug somewhere or its just a problem with RAM on my end, I bet this is solvable. I'm pretty stoked that its working at all! :)
But that's not all. At long last and by popular demand, exporting to a standard MIDI file (.mid) is now available, using the new "Export MIDI File..." menu command. I haven't yet tried using the resultant MIDI files with any other apps yet myself, but they seem to play back with no problems in the Finder.
I had a go at this, and it totally did not work for me :/ It output a MIDI file (almost instantly) that did not seem to play in QT (which is where it opened when I double-clicked it). Mind you, I was using a dbsong originally created in a pre-1.1 version of DB with the old interface and old file format that had more recently been converted and saved in the new format. Dunno if that would have had an effect. When I can, I'll try this again with a short dbsong file made up from scratch. I don't know if I'll get a chance to play with this much more before next week at least, but I'll try! Cheers, Carl ps - I also quickly hooked up the Sansamp GT2 with the guitar and it seemed pretty cool. Haven't tried it with the bass, but I'm really tempted to get the Sansamp Bass Driver DI to pick up when I'm in the States next month. It would be cool to have everything preset for bass and guitar on seperate inputs so I could just plug in and go at just about any moment without fiddling around with cables and levels. -- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/