Music Composer

Instruments and playback

Instruments

The Instruments panel lists the instruments in the piece. There's a synth, and sampled instruments: three harpsichords (Flemish, English and Italian), a Renaissance organ, a grand piano, flute, alto recorder, harp and marimba. The samples come from the VSCO 2 and Salamander Grand Piano libraries.

Each row shows how many parts and rules play the instrument, and one that nothing plays is marked Unused.

While an instrument is on screen, each part and instrument has a port, and cables run from each part to the instruments it plays. Drag from a part's port to an instrument to have the part play it too. Drag a cable out of an instrument's port to plug it into another instrument, or drop it anywhere else to unplug it. You can also click a plug to select its cable and press Delete to unplug it. The switchboard button in the Instruments panel's title bar shows or hides the ports and cables.

Each part plays one or more instruments, set in its configuration. An instrument has its own range, transposition, stops and sustain pedal, and the synth has a full patch editor. Double-click an instrument's name in its window's title bar to rename it. Drag a knob up or right to turn it up, and hold ⇧ for finer steps. Click a knob to type a value, and double-click it to reset it.

The synth's patch editor opens with its presets: step through them with the arrows, or pick one from its category. Beside them, one box draws a note of the patch and the other shows what the instrument is playing right now. Under them, the sound's path runs left to right, through the oscillator, the filter and the amp, and below that are the filter envelope, the LFO and the note decay. Drag across the filter's graph to move its cutoff, or up and down to change its resonance.

Global audio effects adds effects over the whole piece.

The transport

Space plays and pauses, and with nothing selected ⌘← and ⌘→ jump to the start and the end. The transport also has a metronome, a loop switch, the tuning of A4, the volume, and the listening speed. The arrow beside the metronome picks its sound, kept for each composition.

The piece shows in your system's media controls too: the media keys, a phone's lock screen, Now Playing. From there you can play, pause, go back to the start and scrub. It keeps playing in a background tab and with the screen locked.

The keyboard

The keyboard along the bottom of the window plays notes as you press it, in the active part's instrument. Drag across it for a glissando. Right-click a key to hold its note on until you right-click it again. Keys outside the instruments' range are dimmed. ⌘-scroll over it to resize the keys. Drag the bar along its top to make it taller or shorter; double-click the bar to return to the automatic height. While the score lane is showing, the keyboard stands at three quarters of its height. The pin at the bar's right end puts the keyboard in a window of its own, which takes no room from the canvas; the window's pin puts it back along the bottom. The Keyboard button in the bottom toolbar shows or hides it, wherever it is. While it isn't along the bottom, the tool's options sit left of the tool wheel and Snap at the right end of the top toolbar. A view zoomed to fit the piece fits again when the keyboard moves. Each composition remembers where it is.

The two wheels at its left bend the pitch and add modulation, and a MIDI keyboard's own wheels move them too. Mod in the bar above sets what the mod wheel drives: vibrato, tremolo, expression (the volume) or nothing. On expression the wheel starts at the top. It's set per interpretation. Moving it affects what's sounding, played or playing back.

MIDI

With the Quill in hand and Keyboard entry on in the bar above the keyboard, each key you play on a MIDI keyboard or the on-screen one writes a note at the cursor, as long as the snap grid, and the cursor moves on when you let go. Keys held together make a chord.

A MIDI keyboard can also play into the piece: press Record, wait for the count-in, and play. Its wheels are recorded too, the bend wheel into a Pitch bend lane and the mod wheel into the lane of what it drives (Vibrato, Tremolo or Expression): the piece's own when no other part has notes, otherwise the part you're playing into, where the lane shows in that part's own viewfinder. An instrument can also send its notes out to a MIDI device, to play them with another app's sounds.

Importing MIDI files

Drop a MIDI file (.mid) on Recents or Music's pages, or pick it with Import..., and it becomes a new composition, kept on this device until you first save it. Each track becomes a part, or each channel in a single-track file. The import picks the nearest instrument we have for each part's General MIDI instrument, and leaves out drums on channel 10.

By default a file comes in as a performance: the notes stay where they were played, timed as the file times them, and nothing is moved onto a grid. Use the file's bars reads it as notation instead, its time signatures as the bars and its tempos as the tempo track. It starts ticked when every note already sits on the file's grid, as a file from notation software does.

A MIDI export keeps the notes where they're written and puts the interpretation's tempo, ramps included, in the file's tempo changes.