Scratch

Hello fans,

today I will give you the mighty power of MIDI in Scratch 1.4
I worked nearly a year on it, and it is great. I saw that you looked for a MIDI support in Scratch and here it is.

You don't need to change your Scratch 1.4 or 1.3
you can copy some programs out of my "xaby's composer" and integrate the MIDI player in your programs

It is simple like drawing a sprite :-)





Supports:

128 instruments, 61 drums, additional sound effects, tempo changes, patterns, loops,
volume control for every single note, ployphonic playing till 48 drums at the same time
or 12 instrument notes at the same time

enough for 10 finger playing and a simple beat in the background


Features:
- arrange melody and beatloop blocks with simple drag'n'drop
compose a beat once save it as sprite or in the xaby's composer palette and
use it so often you need it
simple copy function

like arranging samlpes in Magix Music Maker, but not with WAVE samples,
you do this with your own MIDI blocks

the MIDI blocks can be created with several tools, some of them integrated in
xaby's composer (the future of MIDI composing :-)
and same you can program by yourself as external Scratch application

import and export the MIDI "files" is as simple as import and export sprites,
because I store the MIDI-Data into a picture with the Scratch GIF-color-palette

So it is also very easy to use your songs in your other programs


I am very interessted in making music and I love good and simple music programs
like Mario Paint Composer (look for it on YouTube)

I saved also some good Scratch music programs in my Music-Galery to figure out
what is a simple and good way to compose music, songs, beats etc. ...

My idea was, to make a good flexible system where everyone can put some music tools into it

Here is a list of tools I love:

- piano roll (for composing with a pianolayout)
- notes on lines (note sheets for printing a music book, lerning)
- beat generator, 16 steps in a loop to compose a loop, beat, rhythm



additinal tools:
- music importer with the new Scratch 1.4 ANSWER-Block
(converts text strings into a playable MIDI-sprite)
it is fully compatible to the Mario Paint Composer "textfiles"
open a Mario Paint Composer file in a texteditor and copy the text into the clipboard
and paste it into the ANSWER. It will converted.



- some different drum / beat generators, with different useability.
some mor easy to use, other more complex

esoteric composer, piano falling balls composer :-)


advanced feautures and tools:

- QR-Code exporter for tranfering your songs to your mobile device / phone
- Scratch-Tunes, to scrolling between the greatest songs done in xaby's composer
- 128 channel equalizer, volume control for every note altitude
- simple change for instruments or drums, copy and paste block tools
- lyric tools
- block search, finding a block you named for better finding
- colorize your blocks to categorize them
- beat box, rhythm via microphone

- Mario Paint Composer clone for easy composing


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Working:

Choose an instrument or a drum, instruments on the left side, drums on the right site
click on a simbol, when you click on a choosen one, you will come to a instrument
or select tool

when you choose an instrument, you can use only the melody tools
if you choose a drum, you can only choose the beat-loop tools,
but most of the tools I integrated I programmed so that you can use them for both

to save drum information it needs up to 2 pixels, for instrument notes it needs up to 4 pixels. your blocks can store 12 pixels at the same time
you can playback 4 blocks at the same time, thats 48 pixels

one pixel can store 6 bits, (64 states)
drums without volume / velocity only need one pixel because you have only 61 drums

to have the full MIDI functions (out of balance :-( 
one note needs for pixels

every note can store instrument (one of 128+, volume, altitude)
the duration will be saved with the number of pixels next to each other

drums have everytime the same altitude and the same duration (one pixel wide)
... but it's possible to change the tempo while playing automaticly
additional information will be store in the blocks

so it's possible to jump from one playing block in the "music sprite" to another,
not only to the next one, it's usefull for chorus, loops, patterns, test some parts
of the song, store some songs at one sprite ... etc.

in a music block it's also possible to store text for:
- copyright information, author
- song text, lyrics, karaoke
- name of the melody / beat-loop block

so it's also possible to have a great amount of usefull blocks for sharing

you can compose a block, store it as GIF-file, post it in your blog, website, in your  signature, in your projects ...

sharing MIDI snippets :-)


The technique is also usefull for little animations, playing music and change
sprite costumes like in video editing software or FLASH time line


My own technologies
- DragON (ball Z :-) I call my routines for draging and dropping, simple copy ... DragON
- marking positions is also a component of the DragON
- simple Tool registration, one line for the integration of new tools

my techniques can be usefull in
- operating systems (OS) multi windowing with layering
- strategy games, or buiding games like Pipe, SimCity, Tycoon ...
- or tables with marking fields (like in Excel)
- drawing editors, and level designers for all kinds of games


___________________________________________________
inspired by

Sound Club (Bluemoon Software)
Mario Paint Composer
Magix Music Maker
Dance Machine / Dance Ejay
Reason 4
FL Studio

I hope with that "engine" we will create a lot of great music tool "plugins"

Scratch rulez

Enjoy

Last edited by xaby (2009-11-09 09:28:17)