laserjones Posted November 17, 2005 Report Share Posted November 17, 2005 Hi all!First of all: Happy birthday Thorsten! :-*In my vacation I had a crazy idea and I would like to ask you MIOS professionals whether it would be possible to build (and with how much effort):What about a 16-track MIDI sequencer in hardware, as found on many commercial synthesizers? I don't mean a step sequencer, but a real music recorder that records all incoming MIDI events to memory and can play it back, separately controllable for each MIDI channel.OK, why would anyone want that in the age of Cubase & Co?Well, in my vacation far from home I thought: How nice it would be now to have, for example, a MIDIbox SID built into a handy aluminium case along with a simple hardware sequencer – that way, I could compose and record music anywhere (if close enough to a power outlet) without the need to carry along an additional computer. Plus, I just love stand-alone devices with hardware controls.The device could be kept relatively simple, as it would just be a composing sketchbook, the fine-tuning can later be done on the PC in Cubase etc. I was thinking about the following features:16 switches (one for each MIDI channel, the number could also be reduced as needed), each with three positions: Record, Play, Mute (Off)Two buttons: Start and StopA rotary encoder to adjust the playback tempo (maybe with a display)A rotary encoder (with a big knob) to manually scroll through the current song forward and backward (with the notes playing) at any desired speedA Song Selector button and a Save Song button (songs are saved as standard MIDI files named song1.mid, song2.mid etc.)That would be the minimum feature set. Of course it would be nice to have two locators for cycle playback and punch in/out recording in addition.I guess that the main task would be the file management, and I'm not sure whether MIOS provides the required functions. The luxury variant would be saving on a flash card that could be easily moved over to a PC for transferring the songs. That would require addressing the card's file system. A simpler solution would be to provide a fixed (and reasonably large) amount of memory for each song – less efficient, but MIDI data doesn't take that much space. In that case, the RAM chips could be built into the device and the songs would be transferred to a PC via MIDI.Any comments are appreciated!Regards,Joerg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
laserjones Posted November 17, 2005 Author Report Share Posted November 17, 2005 I forgot: A simple metronome would be needed as well. It would be sufficient to generate a pulse for each quarter note, which could be used to trigger an analog sound source (simple drum generator), or, of course, playing a specific MIDI note for the metronome (but that would require more configuration).Joerg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moebius Posted November 18, 2005 Report Share Posted November 18, 2005 Happy Birthday, Thorsten! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TK. Posted November 18, 2005 Report Share Posted November 18, 2005 Happy Birthdaythanks! :)to the sequencer ideas: I can only say that such a project is feasible with MIOS, but my focus is currently on other stuff :)Best Regards, Thorsten. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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