Happy New Year - Time For A New Start

If you're celebrating new year today, have a happy one. Let's hope it's somewhat better than 2020.

First new year's resolution: I'm making myself start on a new application. As discussed in my previous post I was trying to decide whther to write something that helped in creating sample instruments for the Sforzando sampler or whether to write a program to help generate music from mathmatical sequences.

EDIT: Should have known I'd never keep a new year's resolution: I got distracted!

The second choice has won out for two main reasons:

  1. I treated myself to the industry standard Kontakt (£eek!) sampler for Christmas. This is so much more sophisticated than Sforzando (£0) and I'll be using that to build new sample instruments instead. (As an aside, the fact that Kontakt has a scripting language that uses the := assignment operator pleases me more than it should!)
  2. Mathmatical sequences appeal to the dormant mathematician in me.

So, there we are. Oh and there'll be a bonus mini-app.

It's pretty obvious that I'm going to need to emit MIDI data from the new app. I've never worked with MIDI before so I'll need to spend some time getting my head around that. Thanks to info from Anders in a comment on my last post, I'm intending to take the midiio Delphi components for a test drive to see if they work out. To that end I've cloned the repo into my GitHub account.

And here's where the bonus app comes in. In order to test midiio in a real application I'm planning to write asimple MIDI display application before embarking on the bigger project. This app will simply read MIDI from a file and display an English language description of what it reads. Maybe it'll allow some manipulation of the MIDI before resaving it or playing it on a MIDI device - dunno yet.

Right, well that's the plan. And it'll also be the first code I write with Delphi Sydney. Looking forward to it. EDIT: Turns out that this was the the first code I wrote with Delphi Sydney!

As a way of commiting myself to this, I've opened two new projects on GitHub (both currently empty):

  1. The main project, MathsNMusic, is at delphidabbler/maths-n-music. (North American brethren, please note the UK English spelling of maths!)
  2. The little test app, MIDIView is at delphidabbler/midiview.

I'll try to remember to blog about how it all pans out.

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