Got a friend of mine who wants to know if you can convert a PCI soundcard to a self contained (like away from the computer! he gotta be mad!) MIDI sound module, any advice or suggestions about ummm, anything that is to do with it atall please! thanks! JazX101 ___________________________________ "it was like that before i modded it! honest!"
God that'd be one hell of a task. Suppose its possible, but you'd have to have very specialised knowledge of the electronics involved. He'd have to build some kind of psudo motherboard. Im sure you could make a midi-module from an old computer, though you would have to have a high quality sound card/software solution to get the best sounds. There would also be the problem of the software, as far as i know there are no real software solutions for Midi hardware (its not like a file server / MP3 jukebox). If your friend had the knowhow he could modify one of the open source MIDI programmes out there. A hard project, but possible, but very very hard. Good luck!
id say near imposible you woudl have to split it down to proccesses. in the form of input - proccess - output input being where the sound comes from in digital format. (keyboard, hard disk, ROM/RAM chip) Proccess being converting digital signal to analogue for output. Output being signal to speakers. now you gotta think abotu what happened in each case and how it works. in a computer sistuation it would be all software decoded but as you wont have any "OS" running on the soundcard then you need to find a way round it. ok so if the input was to be a midi keyboard it would be input into the midi port sent to the SPU(sound proccessing unit) and then looped out to the speaker out, line out and to the computer for recording. as for a midi file it woudl be handled by the computer then cached in RAM and sent as encoded data to the soudn card and is then processed again to be output to the speakers. so you would need to work out what each pin on the card did. and how to interface with it. find out what the card expects from each contact how meny datalines and what happens when each data line is set to 1 and 0 indevidually. and when a combination are set to 1 and 0 with that info you could prolly make a ciuircet(sp?) using some kind of PIC and ROM chips. where the rom chip stores the midi file data in HEX. and the PIC has the program on and sets the databusses to 1 or 0 dependant on the note that needs playing. this is how i woudl understand it to be done. NOTE: i know absalutly nothing about direct interfacing. i have just used logic and deduction to come up with that answer. im sure some otehr people could make suggestions based on my answer.
Sounds a lot of trouble. You would be better off picking up something like a Korg AG-10 ( http://homepage.mac.com/synth_seal/html/ag10.html ) for peanuts somewhere. I have one and plug it straight into a MIDI Keyboard to use as a quick and dirty synth when I'm bored.
thanks, i'll pass this all along. i suggested that he get somethin that is actually designed to do this sort of thing, but he muttered somethin about a budget and wandered off. ah well Thanks for all the help, if anyone thinks of anythin else........... _________________________________________ "It was like that before i modded it! Honest!"
