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-7.4 installed on your system to build tclmidi (I don't know if TCL-7.5 will work). 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. 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). It 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-3.0.0 Support for multiple devices, in synch if desired. You can play and record for multiple MIDI devices simultaneously. You can also slave one device to another so their timing stays in synch. Since adding support for this changed some of the existing tclmidi commands, I bumped the tclmidi release number to 3.0. There are also some bug fixes, and support for using a serial port as a MIDI interface. REQUIREMENTS You need tcl-7.4 installed (though tcl-7.5 might work too - I don't know). You don't need the source though, as all the information tclmidi needs can be found in the installed header files and libtcl.a. You also need a C++ compiler. G++ is free and works. COMPILATION NOTES Take a look at the Makefile and edit the stuff at the top. Then just "make" and "make install". You might also want to "make tkmidi" and "make install-tkmidi". To install the man pages choose one of "make install-man-cooked" or "make install-man-raw". The cooked formats the man pages before installing them, raw does not. WINDOWS SUPPORT Is no longer included. But may appear again when I upgrade to tcl-7.5. MISSING THINGS Scripts. I've included four, mplay, mrec, minfo and midtocl. If you write some good ones, send them to me and I'll include them. Lucho Georgiev has written a few, which can be found in the contrib directory. I'm hoping others will contribute too. Xdrum support. Xdrum won't work with this version of tclmidi. I'll eventually redo xdrum to work with tclmidi, but it might be a while. I also want to write a X based score editor based on this stuff. That will probably take *quite* a while. MAILING LIST I've set up a mailing list for tclmidi discussion. To subscribe, send mail to tclmidi-request@boogie.com and include the phrase "subscribe" in the body of the message. The subject line is ignored, so don't put the phrase there. To send mail to the list, email tclmidi@boogie.com. SPECIAL THANKS Thanks goes to all those who have helped me get this thing working. Extra special thanks goes to the following for putting up with a lot of system crashes and debugging to make the driver ports usable. Thank them for getting the driver to work. Blame me for any bugs you find. Ralf Jaegar - Linux Andreas Gustafsson - NetBSD Luchezar Georgiev - Linux Greg Wolodkin - SMPTE, Linux Alberto Vignani - Linux Allaoua Bouabdallah - UnixWare John Utz - FreeBSD Dejan Vucinic - Serial interface And of course I'd like to thank everyone who has been using tclmidi, finding bugs and helping me test. mike durian@boogie.com