On Sun Jun 6, at SundayJun 6 2:34 PM, David W. Fenton wrote:
It seems that my computer (Mac) is always too busy doing
something else (internal housekeeping, I imagine) to worry about
proper MIDI timing.
In general, that's a sign of inadequate memory for the number of apps
being run. That is, paging in of and out to the swap file is going to
bring everything else to a halt, but it's the highest priority of
anything the OS is going to do because otherwise, apps would run out
of memory.
Hmm, I brought up the Activity Monitor for exactly the reason you
mention; to see if I had excessive paging in and out, and I didn't. I
have 3 gigs of RAM, and I use QuickTime playback for Finale (not
Garritan) and I still couldn't get Finale to listen to my tempo taps
properly. It generally heard them much later than I was tapping them,
and occasionally "forgot" to listen and bunched a few of them
together, all late.
About things related to the Atari TOS, I couldn't give a good
explanation, except they always made a big deal about the MIDI timing
being better on Ataris than on the new Mac Plus, the Amiga or the
Commodore of the time. MIDI handling WAS built into the operating
system and it had two built-in MIDI ports, which made it different
from the other computer brands that handled MIDI though some kind of
add-ons.
Apparently TOS could load up to 6 TSR programs that cooperatively
multitasked (not pre-emptive multitasking, if that means something to
you.) The last version of the Atari TOS WAS multitasking in the
modern sense, though I never had that version, without harming the
MIDI timing, so they must have had some solution for that.
I do remember that I had to boot the computer up with the sequencer
disc in it. If I didn't do that, then I couldn't run the sequencer
without rebooting! I guess there were some TSRs to load.
I'm sorry I can't offer any better information than this. My computer
education is spotty and sparse at best. I still think fondly about
that old Atari, though!
Christopher
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