DirectMusic For The Masses
Gamasutra
November 6, 1998
Vol. 2: Issue 44
Published in Game Developer Magazine, September 1998
| DirectMusic For The Masses |
Introduction
History
DirectMusic's Innards
Segments, Tracks and Tools
Programming
The DMS Loader
Output API
Basic Playback
Layers
Composing With Producer
How Deep Do You Want To Go Today?
The Future |
Composing with DirectMusic Producer
DirectMusic has two audiences that it must please: audio creative types and programmers. The face of DirectMusic for a musician or sound designer is an application called DirectMusic Producer. A tutorial, or even a decently comprehensive review, should be the subject of another full feature article once the tool is complete.
Producer's nature reveals itself with the "Insert File into Project" dialog, when it shows a list of the sorts of things it can open. These include all of DirectMusic's editable data types: Bands, DLS Collections, Chord Maps, Templates, Segments, and Styles. Each of these existing data types has its own interface within Producer (Figure 5). These almost behave as their own applications, except that they can pass data back and forth and can be built into unified projects.
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| Figure 5: DirectMusic's Producer Tool |
One great thing about Producer is that it comes with an API that lets developers build new editing tools into the application. This means that if, for example, a vendor wanted to make its algorithmic music generator available as a DirectMusic component, it could build the editor right into the Producer, allowing it to talk with other components such as the DLS editor.
