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The QuickTime Music Architecture

This chapter describes the QuickTime music architecture (QTMA), which allows QuickTime movies, applications, and other software to play individual musical notes, sequences of notes, and a broad range of sounds from a variety of instruments and synthesizers. With QTMA, you can also import Standard MIDI files (SMF) and convert them into QuickTime movies for easy playback.

The QuickTime music architecture is implemented as Component Manager components, which is the standard mechanism that QuickTime uses to provide extensibility.

QTMA components exist both in QuickTime for Mac OS X and for Windows.

Different QTMA components are used by a QuickTime movie, depending on if you are playing music or sounds through the computer’s built-in audio device, or if you are controlling, for example, a MIDI synthesizer. During playback of a QuickTime movie, the music media handler component isolates your application and the Movie Toolbox from the details of how to actually play a music track. The task of processing the data in a music track is taken care of for you by the media handler through Movie Toolbox calls.

The following sections provide overviews of these components and their capabilities.

Contents:

QTMA Components
QuickTime Music Events
The General MIDI Synthesizer Component
The MIDI Synthesizer Component
The Base Instrument Component

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