Configuring Your sound card and MIDI Equipment

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Configuring Your sound card and MIDI Equipment

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When Musician runs for the first time after installation, the default Notation Software Synth allows you to immediately start playing MIDI files that you have opened. You should hear sound through the speakers connected to your sound card.

If you do not hear sound, then use the Quick MIDI Device Setup command in the Setup menu. Use it to test the playback of alternative MIDI playback devices on your system, and choose a device for which you do hear sound. If that does not work, then follow the advice in What To Do If You Do Not Hear Sound.

If your sound card is connected via a cable to a MIDI keyboard, then you should also be able to play at your keyboard and hear sound through the speakers connected to your sound card. If you do not, then follow the advice in What To Do If Play-Along Does Not Work.

If the MIDI playback and recording capabilities of your system are simple, Musician makes it very easy for you to set up your MIDI devices. See Procedures for Common MIDI Configuration Tasks. The topics in that section are:

B8Assigning Device Names That Make Better Sense to You
B8Changing the Default Playback Device
B8Installing a MIDI Cable Between Your sound card and Keyboard
B8Adding a New MIDI Keyboard to Your Configuration
B8Deciding Whether or Not Your Keyboard Should Directly Produce Sound

Musician has been carefully designed to avoid overwhelming music enthusiasts with many of the underlying technical details of MIDI. However, if you have a sophisticated MIDI studio, Musician provides a powerful, but intuitive MIDI Device Configuration Window, in which you can describe to Musician exactly how your MIDI studio is arranged. Common tasks for managing MIDI studios that are more complicated than a single sound card and keyboard are described in the section Procedures for Advanced MIDI Configuration Tasks, which includes these sub-topics:

B8Installing a Software Synthesizer
B8Anticipating the Delay on Some MIDI Output Devices
B8Configuring a New External MIDI Sound Module
B8How to Handle Devices Connected with MIDI Thru Cables
B8How to Save Effort If You Rearrange Your MIDI Equipment Often

The final section of this chapter provides a detailed guide to using all of the features in the MIDI Device Configuration Window. Again, if your music equipment consists of no more than a sound card and a keyboard, then you will find it easier to use the Quick MIDI Device Setup window. However, if you want to utilize the full performance capabilities of Musician on your computer, then these topics will be interest to you.

The topics in this chapter's final section, Using the MIDI Device Configuration Window, are:

B8Understanding the Details of the MIDI Device Configuration Window
B8Testing Playback and Recording Devices
B8Managing MIDI Ports
B8Managing MIDI Devices
B8Assigning Bank and Patch Names to a MIDI Device
B8Managing Alternative MIDI Device Configurations

 

Please note that the release of Version 3 of Notation Musician made it necessary to change the format of the older MIDI Device Configuration files (MidiDev.cfg).  If you are installing Notation Musician after having used a previous version, you will need to reimport any INS (Cakewalk filetype) device descriptions that you may have had previously.