For Musicians Orientation |

Producing music and sounds for Beatnik is a lot like working with a small MIDI studio. The Beatnik software gives you a playback-only MIDI sequencer, a 64-voice multi-timbral stereo MIDI wavetable synthesizer, and a mixer with reverb and chorus effects.
The Beatnik MIDI Synthesizer comes with built-in Banks containing hundreds of Instrument patches and Samples. You can also use your own Custom Instruments, which you create with the Beatnik Editor, based on built-in Samples, your own custom mono or stereo Samples, or both.
Custom Samples can be anything from short instrumental sounds to long audio mixes, with sustaining loops if you want. (Long custom Samples are good for adding vocals to a MIDI piece, or for building interactive multi-track audio remixers.)
Key Concepts
While many aspects of Beatnik will be pretty familiar, you should keep a few new concepts in mind:
The Beatnik MIDI Synthesizer The Beatnik Editor includes the Beatnik software synthesizer - and you can play it in real time using MIDI as you work on your composition and arrangement in your MIDI sequencer or play your controllers. This ensures that the music your listeners hear will be the music you intended. (See Linking to Your Sequencer.) The Beatnik synth can be "played" by several different things at once: by your musical score, or by programming on your Web site, game, Shockwave movie, etc. Even if more than one source is triggering notes, there's just the one synthesizer to play them all. So, program changes on a given MIDI channel will affect all notes played on that channel, regardless of where those note messages "came from." The same is true for mixer volume, pan and effects settings, such as reverb. If your sequence assigns a reverb send level to a particular channel, sounds played through the same channel by the Web page will share the same reverb settings. The Beatnik Editor The Beatnik Editor provides sequence playback only, not MIDI recording or editing, so you won't build your composition in the Beatnik Editor. Instead, you'll create your music in some other MIDI sequencer program, export the sequence as a Standard MIDI File, and import that MIDI file into your Beatnik Editor Session document. The imported MIDI file becomes a new Song in your Session. In addition to the imported MIDI notes, you can assign each Song a mix level and reverb type to use when played. You can also use the Beatnik Editor to modify the built-in Instruments, or to add new Samples and create your own palette of sounds - essentially, as a patch editor/librarian for Beatnik Instruments. You probably know that large Samples can produce slow downloads - and that's why Beatnik also gives you data compression tools for juggling each Sample's size against quality, to find the best trade-off for each one. RMF Files All Beatnik playback software is optimized to play Rich Music Format files (RMF) - and the purpose of the Beatnik Editor is to create them. A typical RMF file includes your MIDI file and any custom Instrument patches and Samples you're created for that song. RMF files can also embed copyright, licensing information, composer and performer credits, and similar information. The entire RMF file is encrypted, to help you control your intellectual property. You'll deliver your music and sounds as RMF files, not audio recordings like DAT, CD-R, WAV files, etc. (Actually, you can export digital audio versions of your Beatnik songs from the Beatnik Editor - but the files get huge, and they're not interactive. RMF is almost always the better choice.) For Beatnik on the Web, a webmaster will place the RMF files you create onto the Web site, and add commands to its Web pages so that your music and sounds trigger and play as Web users browse the site. (If you're versatile, the webmaster may be you!) Interactivity Interactivity is a major element of Beatnik. Your Song can play the same way each time (yawn), or it can change dynamically in response to your listener's actions (wow!). For example: special sounds triggered by mouse-clicks, or musical arrangements that change dynamically over time. Interactivity is not defined in the Beatnik Editor. Instead, the programming that makes up the Web site, movie or game will monitor the user's actions and send commands to the Beatnik Player. These commands (in JavaScript, if you're interested) can mute or unmute MIDI file tracks or MIDI channels, trigger built-in or custom sounds, start or stop song playback, and much more. See Playing the Beatnik MIDI Synthesizer. Unless you're a programmer as well as a musician, the interactive control of your Song will probably be implemented by someone else. You'll hand off RMF files to your programmer or Web page author, along with suggestions on where and how each Song should be used. Staying involved and maintaining good communication with your programmer is critical to achieving good interactive results! It's possible to create an RMF file that has only Instrument and Samples, but no musical score (no MIDI file). This would be appropriate when the Web site needs to play sound in response to user actions, but doesn't use a traditional music track. This form of RMF file is called RMFX.
That's the high-level view of what working with Beatnik is like for a musician. The rest of this For Musicians section explains all the details.

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