History/Notes for The Music Modifier

A long time ago, on a planet we call earth George Gerswin wrote
Rhapsody In Blue.

1964
Several decades later I was born and later grew up really liking the song.

1987
Well, the GS came out and had some simple short versions of R.I.B.
For personal enjoyment I wanted a better long version.
I figured, I'll just get Music Construction Set or Music Studio, a copy of
RIB and enter all the notes in the different instuments.  Well, since then
I decided against that idea.  

1. I can't really play any instruments and can't sight read music
either.

2. It would take lots of time to enter all the notes, rests, etc.  3.
DMCS never came out and neither program had the best sound.  So I gave
up on the project.

1988
Along came Diversi-Tune, here just what I wanted, good music playback.
Now, how to get RIB into it.  Again there were some short versions but
not what I wanted.

1989
Well, I'm interested in music, even if not a musician, and looked around
on some BBSs.  I found a long (a mere 124K) two piano version in MIDI
file format. Now to get it into DT.  Researching and decrypting took
quite a while (on and off during senior college project year). (Not to
mention other on/off back burner projects)

1990        Version 1.0
Anyway I got it close enough together to make reasonable transfers by
July. But not perfect Wanting to have more than one use program held me
back from releasing the program then.

I wanted more than just MIDI to DT. SynthLab was now out (somewhat),
wanted to take in MCS and MS files. I wanted to take in some other
computer files also. I wanted to transfer between formats also e.g. DT
to SL, DT to MIDI, etc. Also I wanted to add a better user interface
maybe.

Now my job often sidelined me.

1991        Version 2.0
Resume work on TMM find semi major bugs in old DT support code. April,
work like crazy getting SL output from MIDI

NOTE: Luckily SynthLAB 1.0b2 seems to accept sequences > 128K (on my
machine)... RIB grew from 124K to 245K. The DT version was only 124.5K,
but DT format is closer to MIDI

In the schooling of publish or perish I've decided to publish the 2.5
version of my conversion program. It was going to be 2.0 but someone
mentioned DiversiTune to SynthLab conversions and I decided to throw
that into this revision. Relatively easy since as stated above DT is
close to MIDI already. Only took about a day and a half.

Currently this program is being placed in the Public Domain.

The program is not pretty, bad user interface, little error support,
slow, etc. but it gets most of the job done.

Will the program ever be updated?  I don't know. I ramble in my projects
as much as I do in my writing and/or documentation (HA).

Also I've got to get MidiMate and see if it blows my program out of the
water.

It was mostly a personal project, as are most of my current GS projects.
Things I'd like to do to it... MCS, MS, IBM Cakewalk and other input
format support.  Possibly MIDI file output.  Batch of input files, etc.