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Mac to PC Midi conversion

Date1997-08-27 23:34
FromJohn Francis Beahan
SubjectMac to PC Midi conversion
Thanks to all who sent info. on this subject.  I believe we have plenty 
of information to clear this up.  Any more responses are apreciated but 
no longer necessary.


Thanx, John Beahan



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From: Reid Sweatman 
To: 'Kim Cascone' 
Cc: "'csound@noether.ex.ac.uk'" 
Subject: RE: MIDI Files in BIN Format
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 1997 04:37:03 -0700
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On Tuesday, August 26, 1997 2:42 PM, Kim Cascone [SMTP:kim@headspace.com] 
wrote:

> I have clocked many hours of work in the area of Mac <=> PC MIDI file
> transfers and I have NEVER heard of anyone using raw MIDI data...you have
> to convert from the PC to the Mac and visa versa...there is no such thing
> as a platform independent MIDI file...the Mac uses resource fork info and
> the PC uses .mid suffix and you have to juggle this when converting from
> one to the other...

We seem to be consistently butting heads over semantic difficulties . 
 Obviously, you have to get the files from one machine to another.  Apple 
File Exchange does a right nifty job of converting between Mac and PC file 
types.  Just save the MIDI file to disk using AFE and plug the disk into 
the PC and read it.  Should be no problem with raw MIDI files this way. 
 Done it myself a couple of times.  In a standard MIDI file on the Mac I 
don't believe anything is done with the resource fork; it's a placeholder, 
and simply goes away when the file is transferred via AFE.  If you had the 
machines side by side you could also just *play* the MIDI from one machine 
to another, capturing and saving it on the PC end.  My point was, there 
*is* a standard data format for MIDI files, no matter how a particular 
machine likes to lay them down on disk.

Reid Sweatman
Programmer/Audio Engineer