Martin,

==============
I am getting interested in doing some music in squeak. 

I am NOT looking for a sequencer but rather something that allows 
to
express high-level musical concepts such as "similarity" and
"conrast". I might try to write something myself in that area.

Where would I start to explore what capabilities are already present
in squeak. I believe MIDI input and output it all there right ? How
about writing scores (sheet music) ?

I have the "multimedia" book and it mentions "siren". But I only
undestood half of it and it didn't mention any high-level concepts, so
I belive it is not exactly what I want.

Any pointers would be very much apreciated.
==============

I've been experimenting with MIDI input and graphical feedback.  
I've also done some useful 3D "modeling" with Squeak Alice.  This 
is as much to evaluate and learn about Squeak as it is to develop 
something that works.

So far, I've found Squeak to be *very* robust, but the software I 
produce with it is somewhat flaky.  In fairness, that's because I'm 
doing some fairly intense multi-media work, and because I'm just 
plain green at Morphic programming.

The 3D applications will crash on occaision, most likely because 
some floating point operation in Direct3D blows up.  It's not 
horrible, but I can't call the results stable.  Put another way, I'd be 
somewhat hesitant to do a public demo of a fly-through of a 
collection of 3D objects; it would be too easy to crash it.

The good news is that Squeak produces crash dumps that are not 
particularly meaningful to me, but I get the impression that they 
would be if I were trying to debug Balloon3D.  Put another way, I'm 
fairly confident that if some of my own code caused similar 
problems, I would have the tools to debug it.

My MIDI system is perhaps more disturbing because it simply 
freezes.  When this happens, the Squeak main window will repaint 
and respond to system menu commands, but Morphic is in a state 
of suspended animation.  It's impossible to break into it, the CPU 
monitor doesn't report anything, etc.  I _really_ wish one of the VM, 
system menu, main window, etc. commands would somehow log a 
call stack of each Smalltalk Process.  I'm fairly certain that the 
problem is not related to reading MIDI input, but is some kind of 
deadlock between my background processes and/or something in 
Morphic.  I'm assuming it's my fault, but so far, there's really no 
information to be had after it locks up.  If I could see where the 
various processes are waiting, it might explain a lot.

That's probably not a whole lot of help, other than to confirm that 
MIDI input does work, at least on Windows.

Bill



Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Department of Anesthesiology
PO Box 100254
Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: bills at anest4.anest.ufl.edu
Tel: (352) 846-1285
FAX: (352) 392-7029