Option 1: Do Nothing and Use the QuickTime Music Synthesizer
The default behavior of QuickTime is to play music out of the Macintosh's built in speaker, using the Sound Manager. For most users, this is their only choice, as they have no MIDI gear or music hardware cards installed. If there is no file "Music Preferences" in the preferences folder, then one is created the first time any QTMA services are invoked which specifies that the built in sample playing synthesizer be used.
Option 2: Use MIDI Manager and a General MIDI Synthesizer
If you have a General MIDI synthesizer connected to one of the serial ports of the computer and have the MIDI Manager installed, you can configure QTMA to use it through the QuickTime Settings control panel. Simply select the check box for the port you wish to use.
Option 3: Use a Synthesizer Installed In A Nubus Slot
Presently, there is only one Nubus card which has a QTMA driver, the MacWaveMaker from Morningstar Solutions (they're located in Westford, MA). In the above picture of the QuickTime Music control panel, the fourth option shows this card. Because the picture was taken on a computer which had the card installed, the name of the card appears there. To use the card, select that checkbox.
You may wish to use multiple synthesizers. You can select, for example, a General MIDI synthesizer in the modem port and also the MacWaveMaker card by clicking first on the General MIDI In Modem Port button, and then on the MacWaveMaker button.
Option 4: Use Other Synthesizers with OMS or the MIDI Manager
Well this is the hard one. To use any synthesizer or combination of synthesizers beyond those described above, you must use the QTMusic Configuration application. Its functionality is a superset of the control panel's.
The user interface for this utility is presently at a rather crude level; future versions should become more graceful.
Each row in the window shown above represents one synthesizer. There are menu options in the Edit menu for Add Synthesizer... and Remove Synthesizer... . Only the last synthesizer in the list may be removed.
Each column represents some attribute of the synthesizer. The leftmost column is the synthesizer's name. This is the name which appears in the Instrument Picker when you select the menu of available synthesizers. The second column is a pop up menu of the available types of synthesizers. As you add synthesizer drivers into your System Folder, they are added to this menu. Presently we provide the unsupported "QuickTime Synthesizers" extension, which contains drivers for a small sampling of devices.
The third column may have several meanings. For a MIDI device, the third column contains a menu of available MIDI ports. For a hardware card, such as the MacWaveMaker, it will contain a menu of card numbers. That is, if you have two MacWaveMakers installed, you can select which one to use from this menu. For a software synthesizer, or a hardware synthesizer with only one device installed, the third column remains blank.
Finally, the fourth column contains the system MIDI channel for each MIDI synthesizer. It is blank for a non-MIDI synthesizer. This is not a list of which MIDI channels the device will receive on, it is only the system channel. One of the novel features of QTMA is that it dynamically allocates MIDI channels on synthesizers as needed. In the illustration above, several devices are all set to MIDI channel one for their system messages. This is fine, there is no conflict, since the message types are unique for those devices. If you used more than one of the same kind of synthesizer, though, you would have to set them to unique system channels.
The number of synthesizers for which drivers have been written is tiny. The overwhelming odds are that your synthesizers are not yet supported. There are two things to do. The second is to write a driver for it. (Please see, "How To Write A MusicComponents" for some details. Also, this author can be contacted for assistance; for now, my standing offer is Will Trade Driver For Synthesizer. dvb@apple.com.) However, the first thing to do is use QTMA's "generic MIDI synthesizer" driver. This shows up in the second column with the name, "MIDI Synthesizer." This is an idealized MIDI synthesizer which is assumed polyphonic, and assumed to respond to the most common controllers, such as Mod Wheel, Pitch Bend, and Volume. It is presumed to have 128 programs available, and live on a single MIDI channel, which is marked in the fourth column. By entering a name in the first column, you can control how the synthesizer is listed in the Instrument Picker, and other places.
Crashing. In the course of installing different versions of QuickTime and the QuickTime Synthesizers, I have occasionally gotten into a situation where as soon as I start any QTMA application, the system crashes. The usual fix is to remove the "Music Preferences" file in the Preferences folder. (Naturally, this refers only to prerelease versions of QuickTime. The final version is quite solid.)
Patch Bay. You may be tempted to use the MIDI Manager Patch Bay to do "clever" things with QTMA. Don't. We do not support the use of the Patch Bay as a user interface. QuickTime takes care of all necessary routings. Any user meddling with the Patch Bay will come to a bad end, I promise.
PowerBooks. Some PowerBooks have only a single serial port. As far as MIDI is concerned, this is the modem port. Be sure to disable LocalTalk and turn off the internal modem. If you twiddle enough control panels, it will eventually work.