TCS - Midi Music and Multimedia SIG

Midi Music and Multimedia SIG

by Mike Henson
Tulsa Computer Society
From the October 2001 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter

We had 6 people at our September meeting, where we talked about a really inexpensive ($15) MIDI notation program called Melody Assistant. This cheap, but powerful, music program packs a lot of features that the big expensive guys have. It lets you enter, play and print musical scores with ease. You can enter hundreds of musical symbols, such as vibrato, slur, trill, fermata, etc., and it uses them while playing the music. It even has tablatures and chord diagrams for guitarists.

You can insert graphics at any point on the staves, and all of the musical symbols can be colorized to enhance the printing of your music. You can also enter lyrics and relate the words to the music, and let the music play in a Karaoke mode. The lyrics scroll while you are singing, and you can control the speed and pitch of the playback. You can even have Melody sing the lyrics for you, with its own voice synthesizer.

Melody also has digital recording capabilities, and even has a simple digital sound editor. So you can record your own words from a CD or a microphone, and use them as instruments in your tunes. You can also record complete digital audio tracks from a CD or other device. These digital tracks can be mixed with regular or MIDI staves.

Melody is available for both Windows and Macintosh. You can download a shareware version of Melody Assistant from www.myriad-online.com. Be sure to also check out Harmony Assistant, Melody's $65 big brother, which has even more features. Also look at OMeR, a $15 package that converts scanned music into MIDI.

Mel Sutter is coming back by popular demand. He will be at our October meeting and he will bring another player piano with him. The November meeting will be about converting between different music formats, such as MIDI, MOD, WAV and MP3. Come join the fun at the Harmon Foundation, 2901 S. Harvard, on the third Tuesday of each month at 7:00 PM.



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Tulsa Computer Society 10/06/2001
Don Singleton, President