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Despite the difficulties, developing this kind of content for QTMA has advantages over other Internet audio systems. More than 100 million machines have QuickTime, which means your music has a huge potential audience. You can also use the system to create high-quality, low-bandwidth audio-enhanced MIDI scores for QuickTime videos, and the audio will lock to picture just like with a real movie.
On the other hand, QuickTime has its limitations. QTMA does not support compression when working with individual samples, even though QuickTime audio tracks can be compressed with the excellent QDesign algorithm. If I could have used compressed samples within my MIDI tracks, the three-minute song could have been reduced to about 100 KB. There are other stumbling blocks as well. You can’t create multisampled instruments; you can’t select custom instruments in your tracks using MIDI Program Change messages; and you can’t play your custom instruments from your sequencer (but you can gain access to the internal Roland bank through the Open Music System).
Fortunately, assistance is on the way. QuickTime 5 is already in beta release (the final version may be available by the time you read this article), and it includes a major upgrade and overhaul of the MIDI architecture. DLS and SoundFont banks will be supported, which will make the entire content-development process easier because of the many tools available for creating audio in those formats. QuickTime is such a practical Internet streaming-media technology that a widespread cross-platform installed base is guaranteed.
In any case, I will be watching my favorite software synthesizer’s evolution. The newest incarnation appears to be emerging as an audio engine for cell phones and other wireless devices. Who knows where it will pop up next?
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Rose By Any Other Name During the mid-1990s the SoundMusicSys technology that gave rise to Apple’s QuickTime Music Architecture (QTMA) underwent a number of incarnations. Steve Hales and Jim Nitchals started a new company called Igor’s Software Laboratories to develop their technology for Internet applications. By that time, I was independent but still providing content for the system; I worked on sample libraries for Be and WebTV, which had already licensed versions of the synthesizer for their operating systems. That’s when Thomas Dolby got involved. He had a company called Headspace and ideas about implementing interactive audio on the Internet. He discovered the Igor synth while writing music for the WebTV box; he liked it so much, he bought the company. Renamed the Headspace Audio Engine, the system went through further changes and eventually emerged as Beatnik, the premiere interactive audio plug-in for “sonified” Web sites. The fact that SoundMusicSys, QTMA, and Beatnik share a common ancestry explains why QTMA and Beatnik have so many similar features and parameter options. I had a definite sense of déjà vu the first time I opened the Instruments editor in QuickTime Player Pro. The parameters had familiar labels because they were based on the same set of data fields that I tweaked for years while designing instruments for Beatnik. |
Peter Drescher is a composer, piano player, and owner of Twittering Machine, a project studio in San Francisco. He maintains his Web site at www.twittering.com
Reprinted with permission from
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