Trnsfrmr

The OSX blofeld editor.

Sold my blofeld so this is as dead as BeOS.

When I popped the blofeld cd into my Mac, the one thing that was conspicuously missing was an installer for an editor/librarian. The blo has a great programming interface and doesn’t necessarily need an editor but the recent trend has been for manufacturers to include a standalone editor and in some cases, a plug-in editor as well.  Both my Virus TI and m3 offer plug-in editors and with the firewire option, the m3 can get on par with the TI.

I emailed an enquiry and got a response from a Waldorfian stating that they were anticipating a release early next year but I am still going to develop my own editor. Having a free editor provided by the manufacturer has not deterred me because I’m motivated primarily by the opportunity to learn.

So how far have I gotten?

The night after the Obama win seemed like the perfect night to begin the project. I no longer had to refresh huffingtonpost, nytimes, 538 & cnn every few minutes, or read every analyst on politico. In short, I had a void to fill and naturally, I picked an endeavor that would keep by fat ass glued to the Mac.

First-order task was to to peruse http://tinyurl.com/coremidi1. I didn’t find much of a conceptual discussion so I delved into MIDIServices.h using this sample as a roadmap of sorts.

The first glance at the sample code erased the anxiety I had built up about working with a procedural C API. The worry I had about using pointers, refCons, mallocs and bollocks was obviously unfounded. In the next hour, I crossed the milestone of sending a middle C note to the blofeld. Yeaaah!

I plan to chronicle the entire journey here so stay tuned.
Getting Started With CoreMidi