First Quartz MIDI test - developments and issues

This was the first time I opened Quartz. A relatively simple interface to get to grips with. An editor window with a viewer, a library and a patch inspector like most Apple softwares. It comes with patches and plug ins, but after extensive research on forums, the general consensus seemed to be that kineme.com had many powerful free ones for download that allow extra parameters and functionality so i got some of those to test out at a later date.

Before beginning to think about the audio and Live, i needed to adjust a setting in the Audio MIDI preferences. This had to do with the IAC driver that is required to send midi out on a bus, and have it recognised in Quartz with via that bus and a MIDI notes receiver.

The full Ableton File of the track and its construction was then brought into Live.. First of all, there were a couple of the channels were audio files. Due to it being the MIDI signal that is required, these had to be converted. This was done by a function in live 8 that allows you to slice an audio track to a new MIDI track.
However. This put the different frequencies/splices of the audio onto different MIDI notes in the scale. Thus making it a mammoth task in quartz to join the right aspects of the receiver to the signal its receiving as there are so many notes..
After a bit of thinking, i decided that the best course of action would be to create a dummy MIDI track for each of the audio clips, and copy the pattern in to a MIDI track, without assigning it a sound. This meant that the midi could be sent out to quartz, in simple patterns that correspond to the wave forms, on a single note. Thus, when receiving the signal in Quartz, there is only one, patterned MIDI note to deal with for each Instrument in live. (Comprised of multiple sounds and notes)
This took me a while to get round but it has turned out to work perfectly. Not the most elagent solution but one that works none the less.
So with different components on separate 'sends' or channels, being sent out on bus 1, and lot of trial and error with different settings in Quartz, it finally started working..
Another snag that i had, that took a few hours of research was that with the Snow Leopard Mac osx 64 bit version, there is a slight bug. A MIDI note sent from Ableton that was, for example, on note C3, would be received in Quartz as C5, two octaves above. There is no answer for why this is as of yet. On forums and even developers at apple are not sure why this is. However the beauty of quartz and the developer tools is that they are open source. Therefore there is an open dialogue between apple and the user for updating and developing the software and it is only matter of time before someone solves this issue.

In The Quartz editor environment, there are several things that needed doing before the signal could be received.
MIDI notes receiver in place, the drop down menu - patch inspector, under the settings section, the channels can be selected here (received from Live). Once matched, the signal being sent out of Live to the notes receiver is now active.

The first thing that was done compositionally was to add a black backdrop. This was achieved through the library window and setting a backdrop.
A series of lines was then added through a line family patch in the from the Quartz library. An interpolator was then added and assigned to the 'enable' function of the line family patch, as well as being attached to the start and finish position on the z axis.
Other patches available were sprites and billboards. (Many more but for the basics and interoperating midi these were the easiest to use first time round...

Another thing to note is that hte area of the viewer window is 2x2. Everything is contained within these parameters in the patch inspector also. (axis parameters)....