Audio Units

Trying to get around the Apple developer documents is a nightmare. There aren't hyperlinks to keywords so you have to switch back to the index; subjects aren't discussed in great detail - how to use AudioUnitGetProperty etc. Even Microsoft's documentation is more complete than that! Wow! Way to go Apple!

Parallels and MSVCR80.DLL

I'm toying around with Parallels on my Mac. I'd like to try VMWare Fusion but no key (probably on my mail elsewhere). As an experiment, I tried my Windows version of Melody Mine and found it doesn't work!

Turns out it's a MSVCR80.DLL dependancy. And a bug in my manifest file supplied with Melody Mine - it refers to V9 of the runtime (as I've got VS 2008 Express). Remove the reference, it works fine.

VSTi and AU

Last time I tried to create a VST host, then bolt Melody Mine on the front of it... well, it didn't really work. That may have been due to using Delphi to create everything (Delphi doesn't do so well with floating point exceptions). Now that I'm using C++ with wxWidgets, maybe it's time to try again.

Meanwhile, playing around with Audio Units on my MacBook seems so much easier that VST + ASIO on Windows! I've modified my keys application to use the Apple Synthesiser, so I may try the same with Melody Mine (which uses Port MIDI - this requires an external synthesiser to make any sounds). That may mean I drop PortMIDI and use my own classes to talk directly to the MIDI API on Windows and AU on MAC.

Facelift

A facelift for Melody Mine - replaced the song grid with a custom grid of my own. Editing with it is much easier.

Meow!

From TheRegister:

"CodeGear - the unwanted Borland Software subsidiary its parent pimped on the market for about year but failed to find a buyer for - is trying to give JBuilder a lift in a commoditized market, but risks sapping energy that could go into less visionary but more immediately useful coding tools.®"

Read the full article here.

Exporting MIDI

Ported the Windows only code that writes out MIDI to a cross platform version for the Mac. Seems to work on the PC.

Switched to PortMIDI

I switched my midi output to PortMIDI - got it working on the PC and fixed an annoying bug. Took a while to get past build issues on the Mac but got that working too, though the setup is not as simple as the PC.