At 16:23 06/04/2003, Mike Carlyle wrote:
I wonder about this, since I had some ideas that I didn't want to be redundant about.
I've been lurking on the list a while, reading others' comments, and wanted to ask about a feature or two that I don't recall seeing before. First, I want to say that Doggiebox really looks like its going places, and its continuing evolution is one of the main reasons (besides destitution ;) that I've held off on buying a "hardware" drum machine :) Idea 1: import from MIDI file. I didn't use the old Virtual Drummer program much, but I remember that it had some ability to import standard MIDI files and strip out everything but the percussion tracks which you could then edit as normal. As a frustrated home-studio hobbyist guitarist/bassist with a) rudimentary boom-chick-boom-chick-crash-crash drum skills :) and b) no space (or noise-proofing for a drum kit anyway :) one of the ways that I've tried making drum tracks for my little compositions before is finding bits of percussion parts I like in existing MIDI files and then "Frankensteining" them together in some MIDI editor or another. That's probably morally reprehensible, but I hope after enough exposure to other people's patterns, I'll become better at simply writing a sensible drum part from scratch myself :) Anyway, one can do this in MIDI editors like Harmony/Melody Assistant, but it would be _great_ if I could import percussion parts from MIDI files into Doggiebox and edit them there because, frankly, Doggiebox has an easier to use interface IMO :) Idea 2: slave to MIDI Time Code Another thing I think would be very cool, which kinda falls into the forthcoming feature concept "integration with other audio recording and composition tools", would be if it were possible to leverage Mac OS X MIDI services so that I could slave Doggiebox on my Mac to MIDI Time Code coming from my external hard-disk recording module. That way, when working on a multitrack recording, I could be sure that Doggiebox would always "come in" at the same place, making it really easy to alter and re-alter the drum part without it coming out of sync with the rest of the recording. (I can output the Doggiebox composition to AIFF, and play it to the recording module, of course, but then I usually have to "nudge" the entire drum track back into sync with the other instruments on other tracks.) That might be a complicated feature to implement, though! I don't know how easy Apple has made it for developers to implement MIDI functionality .... But hey -- enough of my yakkin'! Whaddaya say? Let's boogie! :) Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson mailto:cea@carlaz.com http://www.carlaz.com/