hello! just a question, what is MUSIC_TIME? I just don't get the explanation in DirectMusic's help. How is it relative to the tempo? Is there any way to get the MUSIC_TIME of a measure in a MIDI file? I'm trying to implement a seeking feature in DirectMusic that seeks onto the measures in a MIDI file. I am thinking of computing it myself because I can already get the Time signature and tempo of the MIDI from DirectMusic. So I can just do this: (number of measure to seek to) * (number of beats per measure) * (duration of a beat obtained from tempo beats per minute) = start time of measure to seek to problem is, how do i translate this into MUSIC_TIME? whatever that is... or is there an easier way to do this? thank you!

You probably already saw this in the DX 8.1 docs, but here it is again.

Quote:
Music time is a 32-bit value defined as type MUSIC_TIME. It is not an absolute measure of time but is relative to the tempo. The clock is started when the performance is initialized and ticks DMUS_PPQ times for each quarter-note. DMUS_PPQ is defined as 768.

So if you just created a performance object and, at the same moment, started playing a song in common (4/4) time, by the end of the first measure, the clock would be at DMUS_PPQ*4. Note, that if the beats-per-minute is slower, it will take a longer REFERENCE_TIME to reach the same point, but MUSIC_TIME stays the same.

This might come in handy if you are creating dynamic sound-tracks.

thanks for the reply...

yup I have read that part of the help file. I just don't get how to compute for MUSIC_TIME.

so if I did this:



Would that start the segment on the 2nd measure? I tried it and it just fell silent. It actually went beyond the file's length (which I got from Segment->GetLength()).

The file I tested had 4/2 time signature.

What is the formula for MUSIC_TIME by the way? What unit is it in?

it's 4/4 sorry...i was looking at the MIDI chunk which says 0x04 0x02