Hi Felipe I can't direct you to a good tutorial on MIDI but I can give you a brief of what it is all about. MIDI is about control, it's simply a protocol that came about in the late 70's early 80's when synths started getting digital onboard controllers and then had digital engines made. For some freak unknown reason all the hardware manufacturers actually agreed on a standard. The simplest form of MIDI messages are "note on" and "note off"... a sequencer or MIDI player can tell a synthesizer when to turn a particular note on and when to turn it off. On top of this message other parameters can be associated such as velocity (how hard you hit the piano key), volume, aftertouch (how you release the key). The next level are the controllers, each channel (oops there are 16 channels per MIDI port) has 127 controllers... some of these are predetermined (such as the volume, modulation wheel, e.t.c..)and others are assignable, some synthesizers have more parameters, (LFO's, filters, e.t.c.) than others and these are often given controller channels. The final level of MIDI are the timing controllers.. this is what most people talk about with reference to hard disk recorders and external sequencers... There are 3 types of timing control. MMC, Midi Machine Control... essentially Start, Stop, Resume Midi Clock... tells the device Beats per Minute MTC (aka SMPTE) which gives a real time reference in minutes seconds and frames... (essentially used for video sync) These last 3 protocols are extremely important when using more than one device that requires time.. i.e. in my rig I have an external sequencer, a drum machine, a time based effects unit and of course the computer. When recordong or playing it is essential that these are all in sync.. with MMC and Midi Clock, I can control everything with the external sequencer.. The BPM are set by the external sequencer and I can use the start and stop button on the sequencer and everything begins and stays in sync. So MIDI is essential in a professional studio where any external synthesizers, samplers, sequencers or devices that need time code are being used. Internally within a PC you could use it to say drive a soft synth with a software sequencer using internal MIDI routing. This is really only a cursory look at MIDI and there are more in-depth resources to look at. However I think you can see it's a little more useful than distributing tunes for karaoke. cheers Allan On Tue, 2003-06-10 at 09:41, felipe wrote:

el Tue, 10 Jun 2003 01:41:54 +0200 felipe <filippo(a)email.it> escribió: do you by chance speak (or at least understand) spanish? i assembled an introduction to midi at: http://www.eumus.edu.uy/docentes/jure/midi/midi.html it's an older version; an expanded and corrected version is almost ready, but i must finish a few details before i upload it. best, lj