Midilib 0.1 beta

INSTALLATION:

Unzip midilib in its own directory. Run the program from there. That's it.
I'm a firm believer in low impact programming.



This is the first release of my Midi Sysex Librarian. This program is designed 
to read sound patches from various SGUs (Sound Generation Units.....ie your
 synthesizer), and save them to disk. It will allow you to open a patch file 
on disk and send it to your SGU. It will also allow you to create empty patch 
banks so you can drag and drop sounds from other patch banks to create new 
ones. This program is NOT a patch editor and it is NOT a general purpose midi 
controller. It's just not designed to do those things although it may grow 
into that some day.

I wrote the program for one purpose: To make it easy for people to trade 
sounds over the Internet (or by whatever means, floppy etc.). The program 
shuffles sounds from SGU to disk and from disk to SGU and it does it very 
well. But that's all it does.

The program currently supports the following SGUs:

Yamaha DX7
Kawai K1
Roland D110
Ensoniq Mirage

It supports those SGUs because those are the ones I own. I can easily add 
other SGUs to it but I need to have the actual hardware to play with for a 
few weeks. If you feel like volunteering your SGU, let me know :-)

Features:

You can read your sounds directly from your SGU into a patch bank in your PC. 
The names of all the sounds will be listed.

If you double click one of those names, it will select that sound on your SGU.

You can create a blank patch bank and you can drag sounds to it. So you can
create banks of your favorite patches very easily that way.

You can save patch banks to a disk file. That way, you can trade with friends.
And you can get new sounds off of the internet.

When you open a file, the program automatically figures out which SGU it is
intended for.





The program can be extended simply by adding the proper DLL to its directory. 
The program comes up, looks in its directory for any DLLs and tries to load 
them. So, if I want to make the program handle new hardware, I just need to 
give it an additional DLL. I don't need to recompile the whole program. Each 
DLL comes with a readme file that contains information specific to that SGU. 
If you have any problems, look there first.

The program is not free. The program is Shareware. The fee for using the 
program is to send me your sounds so I can put them on the net. That's it. 
It's kind of a bartering thing.

This is the first release so it's full of bugs. I don't think there are any 
HUGE bugs but it's not that hard to confuse or break it. If it breaks, just 
start it again. You can send me bug reports at

jim@valhalla.terranet.com

But remember, this program is done in my spare time which I seem to have
very little of these days. I'll fix things when I can find the time. If you
work for a synthesizer company or music company, I'd love to develop this
kind of stuff full time!! Make me an offer :-)

The program runs on Windows 95. It probably runs on NT but I haven't tested 
it. It probably won't run on windows 3.1 and I have no plans to make it run 
there. You're free to try but 16 bit windows are NOT supported.


Possible Future Features:
	User selectable fonts
	Making various zones to be different (user selectable) colors.
	More SGUs
	Other stuff I haven't thought of

Let me know how you like it.

Thanks,
Jim Orshaw - Author