Motu midi timepiece mtp av.8/4/2023 ![]() However it doesn't end there, because two MTPs can be connected to each Macintosh serial port, giving a grand total of four MTPs, 32 independent MIDI ports, and 512 MIDI channels! This is exactly what Mark Of The Unicorn do with their MIDI Time Piece (MTP) - it takes MIDI data from a Mac's serial port and multiplexes it eight ways to give eight fully independent MIDI ports, each offering 16 MIDI channels, making 128 MIDI channels in total. If you choose the latter option, you have effectively multiplexed your fruit (your data) eight ways. If you are receiving trays at the rate of one every minute but a fork-lift only comes to collect them once every eight minutes, then you have three choices: you can either ask production to slow down and send one tray every eight minutes you can do nothing and hang around wasting time for eight minutes or you can arrange for eight fork-lifts to come every minute. Imagine that you're stacking trays of fruit from a conveyor belt in a factory. The second is that the serial ports are running so much faster than MIDI itself, that even at 1Mhz, a MIDI interface has plenty of time in which to multiplex data to multiple independent MIDI ports. The first is that the Mac's serial ports are capable of operating much faster than the current (almost universal) 1 MHz 'standard'. ![]() These conventions ignore two very salient facts. However, even a modest MIDI system can quickly succumb to the spectre of a MIDI bottleneck - the massive data traffic generated by the increased use of Controllers and MIDI mixing can be too much for even two MIDI ports to handle, resulting in anything from small timing jitters to a major chronological hiccup.Īlthough each Mac sequencer has its own unique features, a level of functionality has now been reached beyond which further innovation is limited by the Mac's MIDI interface, or rather the unwritten conventions that dictate its design. ![]() The Mac has always had the advantage of two bidirectional serial ports - the modem and printer ports - which Performer, like all good Mac sequencers, utilises by allowing each individual track to be assigned to either port (giving 32 MIDI channels). Opcode's Vision set new sequencing standards and the recent arrival of Dr.T's Beyond and Steinberg's Mac version of Cubase offer the Mac user a level of choice that Atari ST owners have enjoyed for several years. Performer set the Macintosh MIDI sequencing standard over the subsequent 18 months until the arrival of the first major competition, in the shape of Opcode's unimaginatively named Sequencer and Passport's graphically sophisticated Master Tracks Pro (now known as Pro 4). When it was released in early 1985, Mark Of The Unicorn's Performer, for the Apple Macintosh, was the first fully working professionally featured MIDI sequencer for any computer. ![]()
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