pc midi musings..

[brad sanders]

>If anyone does get into writing windows midi drivers though another good
>idea might be to drive a resistor ladder via the printer port to give a
>very cheap (if you've got a pc already) midi -> cv conversion.

Many problems. Accuracy for one, and quantizing problems. It might be
fine for 1V/oct CV generation (6 bits - about all the accuracy one
could expect with such a circuit) would give 5 octaves of control.

Better solution: Has anyone thought of using soundcards? You can get a
sound card with two 16 bit DACs (with about 14 bits of monotonicity)
for about 25 bucks. It's pretty simple to hack out some quick code in
Pascal to do just about anything. WSS ports are very well documented
(although I've never written a DLL or device driver).

I also wrote some software that samples my joystick ports at higher
rates, increasing accuracy. And, of course, there's two really good
A/D ports on the soundcard.

All that's needed to use a soundcard for CV generation is a solder
blob across the output coupling caps.... and a MIDI->CV driver.

Sure seems to me like a DLL in need of doing.


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