Apple Shareware & Freeware

Why is no‑one giving Mac sequencers away for nothing? Martin Russ dives into the sobering world of shareware and freeware.

It all began with an email from a reader. They asked if I knew of any freeware or shareware MIDI sequencers for the Mac, because they had searched around and found only one, which seems to be less than perfect...

I know exactly what they mean. In 10 years we've gone from simple intuitive tape recorder emulations to extremely sophisticated Digital Audio and MIDI sequencers which are so complex that they can require days of learning before you become competent at using them. And unlike the Atari ST, the Mac has never had much MIDI freeware and shareware written for it. Perhaps some of the problem lies in the way that the Mac does MIDI. On an Atari ST, you wrote bytes to a location and they appeared at the MIDI Out; you read bytes from another location and they were received at the MIDI In. You needed to change a few variables here and there to alter buffer sizes, but it wasn't difficult at all. And as a result, lots of people, myself included, wrote lots of MIDI software for the Atari ST.

On the Mac, things are slightly different. Persuading MIDI bytes to appear at a standard Mac MIDI interface requires a little bit more programming, and in a Mac there's always a set way of doing things through an Apple‑defined interface. Things get more complicated if you want to use the Apple MIDI Manager, and even more taxing if you want to use Opcode's OMS or MOTU's FreeMIDI. Instead of simple reads and writes, there are complete protocols to be negotiated. This tends to put amateur programmers like myself off a little bit, because it requires a large investment of time to get to grips with. As a result, Mac MIDI software is rare, especially freeware or shareware.

But it does exist. A few years ago, the logical place to look for it would have been a Mac shareware disk supplier, but these have been largely replaced by two modern phenomena: the cover‑disk CD and the Internet. Music magazines, which have to fill up 650Mb of CD every month, don't take long to run through just about every decent bit of MIDI, music and audio related freeware or shareware — although there are always lots of commercial demonstrations. There are also some specialist suppliers of collections of shareware and freeware on CD‑ROMs. And on the Internet, it only takes a few minutes to find almost anything using a search engine — although downloading a couple of Mb can take a little longer with a modem connection. A bit of searching on the Internet, or failing that, buying up some cover disks at a car‑boot sale, should provide plenty of stuff to investigate.

I've assembled a table showing some of the sorts of things that you may well find, and a few of the columns need some explanation. The 'size' is the size of the main application itself, which often gives a guide to the sort of complexity you can expect. The PPC/68K column shows if I was able to discover anything about its PowerPC compatibility — I'll soon be able to test this myself. The OMS, QuickTime column shows possible interfaces rather than required ones.

For more details on Mac shareware, see page 6 of Crosstalk in our October '96 issue, and Mark Tinley's article on sample RAM in September '96.

Power!

It had to happen. After resisting the inexorable advance of the PowerPC chip, my humble Centris 610 is beginning to look distinctly old‑fashioned and a little bit tired, and (the final straw this) was recently described as 'quaint'! Hi‑tech music magazine columnists have their limits, but when my Mac is put down like that, then I see red — and my favourite Mac dealer sees money!

So, I started the usual preparation for a major purchase. Did I have the money? Hmm — it looks as though more people will have to buy my book on Sound Synthesis and Sampling... Could I justify it? Perhaps. Would it look underpowered alongside a dual Pentium II MMX tower with a 17‑inch monitor? Definitely not. What should I buy? Ah, the $64,000 question.

What you require of a MacOS computer for use in music is rather different from what most other computer power users want. Graphics accelerators and millions of colours don't matter much when you only need 256 colours at most but as large a screen as possible. Networking gossip about Ethernet and 10‑baseT is much less important than decent serial ports. RAM Doubler isn't quite such a useful accessory when timing is critical. Hard drive performance is probably considerably more important than the price, and a CD‑R drive is arguably more attractive than a plain CD‑ROM reader. Fancy user interfaces are almost unimportant when you spend almost 100% of your time in one or two big applications, and so having a multi‑threaded Finder is much less important than the consistency of real‑time operation. Processing power and stability are vital, since no‑one likes waiting or losing hours of work in an instant.

So what did I go for? Well, despite the ongoing Apple saga, I decided to stay with my first love and scanned the Mac magazines' in‑depth reports, looking for those critical words: 'expandability' and 'better performance than expected for the price'. I also applied the old computer maxim of 'buy the best you can afford — now!'. Taking into account all the price reductions in the pre‑Apple Expo/November new releases period, I went for a PowerMac 7300, which met all of my requirements with one hugely embarrassing exception: it comes bundled with Microsoft Office! If it wasn't for the fact that some aspects of its performance are on a par with, or better than the 8600 which costs almost twice as much, then the 7300 would have been rejected. As it is, I'm tempted to try and remove the infection so that I can retain my '100% Microsoft‑free site' status.

The next few Apple Notes will almost certainly document the transition from 68K to PowerPC, and perhaps even to MacOS 8 when the upgrade arrives. Some of my best‑loved utilities and gadgets may well not survive... I'll keep you posted.