Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.Hawaii.Edu!news.uoregon.edu!newsgate.cuhk.edu.hk!hpg30a.csc.cuhk.hk!news.cuhk.edu.hk!news.sprintlink.net!news-stk-11.sprintlink.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!howland.erols.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!pier2.bayarea.net!toro.bais.com!not-for-mail From: greg@toro.bais.com (Greg Wolodkin) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.announce Subject: Tclmidi 3.1 is released Date: 16 Oct 1996 10:34:27 -0700 Organization: Bay Area Information Services Lines: 112 Approved: netbsd-announce-newsgroup@mail.netbsd.org Message-ID: <5436b3$caq@toro.bais.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: baygate.bayarea.net Originator: thorpej@baygate.bayarea.net Mike Durian has asked me to post this announcement for him, as he is temporarily USENET-challenged. Greg --------------------- I have made tclmidi-3.1 available for anonymous ftp from, ftp://ftp.xor.com/pub/midi/tclmidi-3.1.tar.gz. A precompiled version for Windows is also available from, ftp://ftp.xor.com/pub/midi/tclmwin.zip. Feel free to contact me if you have questions. What follows is an excerpt from the README file. OVERVIEW Tclmidi is language designed for creating and editing standard MIDI files. With the proper device interface it will also play and record MIDI files. Since tclmidi is a language supporting function calls, recursion and conditionals, you can use these features for editing, sequencing and writing complex scripts. The brave might even want to try their hand at algorithmic composition. The basis of tclmidi is John Ousterhout's popular TCL language. tclmidi adds a few new commands specific to manipulating MIDI files, and playing/recording them. You'll need to have TCL-7.5 installed on your system to build tclmidi. I no longer support earlier versions. I've tried to be POSIX complient while writing tclmidi. It has been built on numerous machines and should compile on any Unix like machine with a C++ compiler. It now also runs under Windows. Tclmidi comes with a device driver to interface with a few types of MIDI cards and also support for using your serial port as a MIDI interface. Supported cards include MPU401, MQX32, Gravis UltraSound and SoundBlaster (though both the GUS and SB support is limited to the MIDI ports, the driver does not yet use these board to generate their own sounds - the SB hasn't been tested much either). There is some proto code to use the GUS to generate its own sound, but it doesn't work yet. Look for it in future releases. Tclmidi will also support some features of the different cards, including the SMPTE support found on the MQX32. The driver tries to be OS independent too. 90% of the driver is completely portable, only the remaining 10% needs to be rewritten to support a new UNIX varient. This distribution comes with support for BSD/OS, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Unixware (though the Unixware driver isn't completely tested). These five cover a wide range of systems and one should make a good basis for a port to a new system. WHAT'S NEW IN TCLMIDI-3.1.0 Tclmidi is now a loadable module that works in conjunction with Tcl-7.5. There are no longer a tclmidi or tkmidi executables. Instead you use the standard tclsh or wish interpreters and then load the tclmidi commands using the "package require tclmidi" command. Tclmidi now builds using the "configure" script. You should no longer need to edit a Makefile. Just "./configure; make" to build the package. Installation has gotten a bit trickier. This is because of TCL's method of locating loadable libraries and building the pkgIndex.tcl file, not because of something found in tclmidi itself. By default, tclmidi installs the library in /usr/local/lib/tclmidi and builds a pkgIndex.tcl in that directory. In order for tclsh or wish to find these files you must add /usr/local/lib/tclmidi to your TCLLIBPATH environment variable or add "lappend auto_path /usr/local/lib/tclmidi" to the beginning of any script that uses tclmidi. The tclmidi driver now has some proto-code for using a Gravis Ultra Sound (both old and new PnP) to synthesize sound directly. Unfortunately, this code doesn't work yet. This will be my major goal for the next release (as well as supporting other sound cards). Windows users will be pleased to learn that tclmidi will run under Windows. I'm very unfamiliar with the Windows 95 environment and the Visual C++ compiler and thus don't have a Makefile to build the .dll from source (VC++ uses "projects" and I can't figure out how to create a Makefile from a project"). However, rest assured that I do build the .dll from the exact same source with no modifications. I also pre-compile the tclmidi.dll and make it available for anonymous ftp. If there are any Windows wizards out there that would like to help me create a Makefile and/or write a good installation script, please let me know. Added a new command, midigrep. It allows you to search tracks looking for events using pattern matching. Much faster than doing the same thing with tcl code. And of course, there have been a few bug fixes. REQUIREMENTS You need tcl-7.5 installed. You don't need the source though, as all the information tclmidi needs can be found in the installed header files. You also need a C++ compiler. G++ is free and works. COMPILATION NOTES ./configure make make install WINDOWS SUPPORT Is back! As I mentioned above, I don't have a Makefile to build it from the source (VC++ uses "projects"), but it does build from the unmodified sources. I also make a pre-compiled version of tclmidi.dll available so you don't have to compile it yourself. You need tcl-7.5 installed on your system. You can get pre-built versions of tcl and tk via anonymous ftp from ftp.smli.com. To install tclmidi, you need to put the tclmidi.dll file in some directory that tclsh or wish will search and then build a pkgIndex.tcl that references the dll. I'm going to try to write a tcl script that will do the installation automatically. For now I'll install tclmidi.dll in the tcl lib directory, but eventually I'd like to put it in a different directory and just have people set their TCLLIBPATH environment variable. Does anyone out there know how to set an environment variable under Windows/Windows 95/Windows NT? If so, please let me know. mike durian@boogie.com ---------------------