Re: max and director

Garth Paine (garth@creativeaccess.com.au)
Fri, 26 Feb 1999 12:31:40 +1100

Hi all,

>It strikes me that with the setup you mention you might want to forget
>about MIDI and have the two Macs communicate via serial cable or
>ethernet using appletalk. I did this in my science fiction opera in 1994
>where Director had to be synchronized with live musicians and singers.
>The keyboard player's MIDI keyboard was connected to a Mac running MAX.
>On certain cues, MAX would send ASCII out the serial port using the
>standard "serial" object in MAX. Director was set up to receive ASCII on
>the serial port on another Mac. The ASCII was used in the same way that
>you would program Director to react to keys typed on a computer keyboard
>(like A for cue 1, B for cue 2, etc.).

I agree - I have used this same setup, infact running number of Macs
running Director from a single control Mac running MAX. I simply looped
the Serial data back out the printer port on the MAC and chained that onto
the next machine. This solution does away with needing a MIDI interface
for ech machine, and passes much less data. I used a character (ie. A, B,C
etc) to indicate which machine should accept the message followed by a 3
digit number for the cue. I used the first character of the string to
initiate reading the port, and cleared the port after reading the 3
following characters so that the port didn't fill up with junk. This
approach worked really well, was reliable and trouble free, and of course
you can run a serial cable over a fair lenght of space.

Cheers,

Garth

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http://creativeaccess.com.au/~garth/

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