M I C H I G A N - S C H O O L - B A N D - & - O R C H E S T R A - A S S O C I A T I O N
 

Barton Polot
is Assistant Professor of Music Education and Music Technology at the University of Michigan 		 

QuickTime 2.0: MIDI and More

BARTON POLOT

Apple Computer, Inc., has recently released an important upgrade to QuickTime, with new capabilities of special interest to all musicians. 

QuickTime is the system software extension that enables a Macintosh or Windows PC to play movie files on a computer. Because of its ability to keep video and audio well synchronized on computers of any ilk, QuickTime is the movie format used by most multimedia developers. Any software that needs to play a movie need only call upon QuickTime code resident in the computer's System folder. 

With a recent upgrade to version 2.0, Apple has addressed many of the shortcomings of previous releases of QuickTime. Notably, action now appears smoother, due to an increase in the frame rate (i.e., images per second), and movie windows can be made much larger than the previous matchbook-sized limitation. 

You can download
the latest version of
QuickTime for MacOS
and Windows95 from
Apple's Web site.

  Apple also signed an agreement with Roland Corp. to license its Sound Canvas sound collection, comprising a portion of the 128 General MIDI timbres. Apple has developed sound synthesis technology that plays up to 10 simultaneous timbres invoked by a new, proprietary MIDI-like language. As a result, QuickTime movies can now include a MIDI soundtrack; the music can be played through the computer's speaker without any additional hardware; alternatively, it can be directed to a MIDI synthesizer. This capability is in addition to the movie's own stereo audio track. 

Apple's motivations for developing this technology are several. Principally, the company is competing with the sound-making capabilities of Windows computers. Once relegated to vastly inferior sound, DOS and Windows machines have recently leapfrogged the Macintosh due to the proliferation of the now-standard Sound Blaster card. In addition, Apple hopes to spur the multimedia revolution by helping to solve one of its biggest dilemmas: enormous file sizes. A file of music in MIDI format is generally one-fourth to one-tenth the size of a comparable file of stereo digital audio. Indeed, hours of MIDI music can be stored on a single 800K floppy disk. 

Michigan MusicTech Home Page   A QuickTime file can be created without a video track — in other words, a MIDI-only file. Using standard QuickTime controls, the user can play, pause, rewind and fast-forward the MIDI track. A control new to 2.0 allows the user to control the tempo as well. Consequently, MIDI playback is now available within any application that supports QuickTime, such as Excel and Word Perfect. Hard to fathom: with QuickTime 2.0 installed in your System, you can insert a MIDI file within a Microsoft Word document. Send a letter to Aunt Molly -- on disk of course; she double-clicks on an icon embedded within the text, and the standard QuickTime playback controls are displayed. Your music plays through her speaker, or in stereo through her headphones. No synthesizer. No MIDI interface. No extra hardware. 

Suddenly, the installed base of QuickTime-ready computers, several million, has become an installed base of MIDI playback units. The possibilities are endless.

Update: Since this article appeared in October 1994, Apple has released version 4.0 of QuickTime. Some of the features described above have evolved.