Bars & Pipes Pro Tools Guide

Mike's Bars & Pipes Pro Tools guide

The Bars&Pipes Professional Tool Guide Painstakingly created by Mike Clarke What is it? Who made it? Legalities History Future **Enter guide**

This guide was created for use as an on-line help system for use with Bars&Pipes Professional by Blue Ribbon Software. Bars&Pipes Professional is a professional MIDI sequencer for all Amigas. Unfortunately, the company who created it were bought out by Microsoft and all further development on the program has ceased. However, just because it will no longer be updated does not mean it has suddenly become crap. The program was doing things 3 years ago that current sequencers on other platforms are only just beginning to implement, and there are features on there which no other sequencer could ever compete with. An old demo is available on Aminet (biz/demo/BarsPipes-demo.lha), and at the time of writing, the full program and all official Tool kits are available to download from Compuserve free of charge. The thing that makes Bars&Pipes so flexible is the Tools system, whereby additional tools can be "plugged in" to do pretty much any task you want. A set of documents is available, Rules For Tools, to enable you to write your own tools in the C language, should a certain feature be missing. This Tools guide will contain instructions for use of all Bars&Pipes Tools. Should you write any of your own Tools, please let me know so that I can include them in this guide. The final version will contain a list of all tools present in the manuals, all tools not mentioned in the manuals, all shareware tools that I can find, and all the Accessories. This guide will NOT be placed onto Aminet. Updates will only be available from my web site, or by e-mailing a request to me. Please read the Legalities section. Mike Clarke 14th October 1998.

Good evening. This guide was created by Mike Clarke. Half the Tools have been typed in by hand (don't I have anything better to do? Well yes I do, but I really wanted an on-line Tool guide, and yes it's taken a rather large number of hours), and the rest I scanned, fixed and corrected to AmigaGuide format. I'm 26 and currently own a music production business doing mostly game music. Prior to that, I worked for Psygnosis in Liverpool (UK). I worked there for over 6 years, and have done music and/or sound effects for about 50 games to date. I use an accelerated A4000T with Bars&Pipes to write my music on. I can't ever see myself using anything other than Bars&Pipes. I use it for all the music I write, be that for work, for the band I'm in, or whatever. For me, it is the ultimate sequencer. That's about it really. You can e-mail me at mike@fromwithin.com.

I'm really not sure about the legalities of this guide. Most of the content is directly from the Bars&Pipes Pro manuals, and is therefore the copyright of either Blue Ribbon Software or Microsoft. You should really own a copy of the original manuals to legally use this guide. However, the manuals are not available anymore and so I don't know exactly what the score is. All other content is copyright me, and maybe freely distributed. No profit may be gained from commercial sale of this guide, or its inclusion in any commercial package. For this reason, this guide will not (and should not by anyone else) be uploaded to Aminet, or any other FTP site. Updates will only be available from my web site.

History V1.0 17th April 1997 - Finished V1.0 with 2.5b original Tools (except guitar and pattern tools). V1.1 - First release 18th April 1997 - Added the ProStudioKit, and added the front end. 30th August 1997 - Second release After a period of being too busy to continue with it, I had a massive surge of energy and almost finished the entire thing. Decided to scrap the version numbers. 29th October 1997 Found some time to stuff in the Multi-Media Tools and the massive Guitar Tool. 30th October 1997 (0:50 am) - Third release I'm still here. Added the Accessories, a few missing tools and some addendums. 13th October 1998 My god! Almost one year on and I'm very glad I wrote this guide as it has absolutely invaluable. Added internal links to other Tools in the Original2.5b Tool descriptions. Also found some information for the On Hold Tool. Added the BeachTools. 14th October 1998 Added internal links to the rest of the toolkits. Updated the title of each tool to include it's kit. Fixed a few errors here and there. 15th October 1998 Added Richard Hagen's Tools and Accessories. 15th January 2000 Don't know why but I was closing down B&P and when I was about to close the Toolguide, I got very annoyed with it. The reason was because I never got round to putting in what I have just spent the last 2 hours doing - adding a full alphabetical listing. So now it's much better for when you have a specific Tool and you want to know what a certain button does. 2nd April 2000 I noticed that for some reason, the NotePad and NoteFilter and the Long Note (which isn't even in the manual) Tools were missing, so I added those, along with missing pointers to the Accent Randomizer information. In a fit of madness, I spent about 5 hours adding the PhooTools (at last!). Updated info on Richard Hagen's Tools and Accessories. I've even added a new section for Michael Rees' very impressive and complicated Tools.

Future The future is mainly concentrating on my HTML manual. You can find the latest version at http://www.fromwithin.com/bpmanual/. I'm thinking of adding in the manual for The Patchmeister at some stage.