Re: [MMM] On the MMM road with Klutz J. Nagy

Jim,

> I don't understand, if Allegro was sending MIDI commands to my keyboard
didn't I already have a yoke?

No. You have a soundboard in your machine. It probably has a MIDI (or
"game" port on it, and you hook a cable to your keyboard right? If you're
hooking up a MIDI cable to your machine and you're using a keyboard to
playback and input, you don't really need Midi Yoke. You use the builtin
MIDI i/o capability. Your configuration looks like:

Allegro -> Soundboard-MIDI -> Audio out to Keyboard
Allegro <- Soundboard-MIDI <- Midi In from Keyboard

Or you can setup Allegro to send output to the builtin sound board instead
of the keyboard.

> but it looks like I pick channels, as if they were instruments

Exactly. Midi Yoke is a separate MIDI "device" that you can use to chain
two programs together. You only need it if you're sending MIDI output to a
soft synth. Then your configuration would look like:

Allegro -> Yoke -> Other-Program -> Audio out to speakers

When you do the MIDI configuration in your application (Allegro or
whatever) the Yoke appears as a device to which you can send MIDI signals,
or from which you can get MIDI signals.

You may need to open the setup stuff in your application and make sure
MIDI in/out are going to the right place. If you're doing a keyboard,
that's probably called "MPU 401" in the control panel. On my machine with a
sound card, the possible MIDI inputs are the MPU-401 (the card itself) or
MIDI-Yoke. The possible outputs are the builtin Microsoft GW Wavetable, or
the MPU-401 (i.e., the "game" port"), or Midi Yoke. Then I hook a soft
synth to the other side of the same MIDI-yoke channel.

> MIDIcode looks easy to use. If the tutorial/manual didn't come all
> winzipped up I might even be able to get it to work. Please spot me
> the way in: what do I do with whichfile to get it started.

Midicode is easy to use. You should just download the Midicode "exe" file
and double-click on it. That gets you the demo. If you purchase it, the
author sends you a key to "unlock" the full functionality.

And Winzip is really standard to unzip the documentation. Everyone uses
zip files for lots of distributions. If you can't extract the zip contents,
you can get Winzip at Winzip.com. Their evaluation version is "free" and
it works.
Rick