Introduction to QuickTime Music Architecture Guide

The QuickTime Music Architecture (QTMA) 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 and convert them into a QuickTime movie for easy playback.

You can use the General MIDI component for playing music on a MIDI device attached to a serial port.

Before reading this document, you should already be familiar with QuickTime and QuickTime components.

You need to read this document if you are writing an application that creates QuickTime movies and you want to incorporate music tracks as part of the movie, either by importing MIDI files or by programmatically generating musical sequences. If you want to create a music component or add an instrument to the existing library of instruments, you also need to read this document. If you are creating new instruments, you should be familiar with QT atoms and atom containers.

Organization of This Document

This document is presented in two chapters:

• The QuickTime Music Architecture describes the features and capabilities of the QuickTime music architecture.

• Using the QuickTime Music Architecture describes the functions that allow applications to control all aspects of playing music tracks and generating musical sounds in QuickTime movies.

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