Additional event information

Note Events. There are three values parameters for note events:

A pitch, which represents the MIDI key number as a note and an octave.

A velocity (0–127), which is how fast the key is struck. Some keyboards don’t transmit or receive velocity messages.

A duration, which is how long the note lasts. This amount is shown in beats:ticks format. (If the note lasts less then one beat, then only the number of ticks is shown.)

Note names may also represent percussion instruments, and lists of such note names are sometimes associated with a particular percussion patch. The note C3, for example, may really be “kick drum.” If a patch is associated with a percussion note name list, the name of the percussion instrument appears in Event List view rather than a note and an octave from the piano keyboard.

Music Creator uses the following notation to display flats and sharps in this and other views:

Table 107.  

Character	Meaning
b	flat
#	sharp
"	double flat
x	double sharp

MCIcmd events

Media Control Interface (MCI) commands are special events that let you control other multimedia hardware and software (e.g., CD-ROM drives, laserdiscs, sound cards, animations, video) during playback. MCI commands are part of the multimedia extensions in Windows. MCIcmd events have one parameter—the command line text of the MCI command. Here are some examples:

Table 108.  

This command	Does this
PLAY C:\Train.wav	Plays the Wave file Train.wav
PLAY C:\Videos\Vacation.avi	Plays the video file Vacation.avi from the VIDEOS folder
SET CDAUDIO TIME FORMAT TMSF PLAY CDAUDIO 3	Plays a specific track from the CD drive
STOP CDAUDIO	Stops the CD from playing

While MCI commands can be used to play Wave files, these files are played at their normal speed and are not necessarily synchronized with MIDI or other audio data. By contrast, Wave audio clips are played in lock-step synchronization with MIDI and other audio data.

For complete documentation of Windows MCI commands, search for MCI on the Microsoft World Wide Web site (www.microsoft.com).