MIDI IN

The first MIDISID batch ('earlybird' pricing) have now all gone, I have the materials for the second batch and the first of those are now made.  There are now black and purple editions. At risk of going all Tim Cook, the black really does look gorgeous. Hardware-wise they're hardly altered but the firmware ('MIDISID OS') has come a long way, new features include: you can set glide speed modwheel support; choose vibrato, filter cutoff or pulse width Increases the range of vibrato, to enable spooky effects Now supports RPN 0 messages - for setting the pitch bend range. (This was important for getting my tiny MIDI theremin working - see https://twitter.com/midi_in_out/status/1574870874158764035 ) ( The manual is here in case you'd like to read about all of the features.) I'll shortly be mailing those who have bought MIDISID already with details for the new firmware. Giveaway Because I'm an idiot, I (genuinely) accidentally bought a second copy of @C64Audio...

No music video this week, I have a piece of music which I am really happy with, but I'd rather give it another week and make it better than rush something out half-baked. So here's what happened with my first attempt at an 'enclosure' for MIDISID .  I like the idea of a slanted-front box with wooden sides, but I had the idea of angling the top by just adding wooden sides.  Here's the first go. It's simply a rectangle of scrap wood, around 65mm x 100mm, cut at an angle through the centre to make two identical pieces. Sanded and waxed.  I made the angle brackets (10mm x 10mm x 50mm) from a chip tube. (Later found to be a little bit flexible, would be better cut from metal). They're drilled with smaller holes for tiny self-tapping screws, and bigger (3mm) holes for the mounting holes in MIDISD's PCBs. Note that MIDISID comes apart for installing in a box or enclosure. The top part is connected to the bottom with a standard JST-SH 4-way cable, you can buy a ...

During the week I learned that SCUMMVM (which allows you to play a large selection of adventure games) has options for routing the music to a device of your choice, while still playing speech and sound effects through the computer. (I'm guessing there was a small window in time when games stored their music as MIDI and also had sampled effects and speech.) There are some things that I want to add. This of course relies on the audio being available as MIDI within the game. I found other games that didn't work this way. When it worked, it worked surprisingly well and is fun. But like playing .mid files into MIDISID, it's not perfect. Because of the limitations and the way that it maps the channels, sometimes parts of the music are lost.  (This is part of the reason why I edited the DOTT intro.) This applies to playing .mid files too, although with .mid files you have the option of editing the files a little to get more from them. It's easy to find the .mid files for the m...