| The Bars&Pipes Resource |
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| WHAT IS? | |
Liquid MIDI is a website devoted to the music sequencer Bars & Pipes Professional. The name is derived from the the way Bars & Pipes treats !MIDI data as if it were liquid flowing through pipes.
Bars&Pipes Professional is a !MIDI sequencer for the !Amiga range of computers. It has a philosophy unlike any other sequencer in existance. Unfortunately, production was ceased when the developers, !The Blue Ribbon Soundworks, were bought by !Microsoft. The last publically released version was 2.5b, dated 28th April 1994. It's !MIDI editing features are far in advance of any other current or forseeable sequencer, and this has enabled the program to retain a devoted userbase with updates still appearing in the form of new !Tools.
Well your first port of call should always be this page. There is lots of information here which will help
you with Bars&Pipes and everything associated with it. Some other people have created Bars&Pipes pages,
links to which are available on the BarsnPipes mailing listLinks page. You are also strongly advised to join
the BarsnPipes mailing list at groups.yahoo.com.
Bars&Pipes was written to run on all kinds of !Amigas. It will even run on a 1Mb Amiga 500, although this is by no means ideal. Of course, the better the !Amiga, the more you will enjoy the usage of Bars&Pipes. I would personally recommend an A1200 (or Amiga of equivalent power) as the lowest point of entry. You can get by without a hard drive, but I would not really suggest doing so. A full collection of all known Tools is over 3Mb, so this alone would make life difficult with only a floppy drive. I used an A1200 with a hard drive for a number of years and it worked perfectly.
If you can get one, then an accelerator makes the program much nicer to use. Although timing will not generally be affected unless you are using a lot of Tools, screen updates and processes such as copying data will be much quicker. I could never step back from using a 68060 now.
If you start to use Bars&Pipes heavily then more RAM is definitely in order. This will actually speed up your !Amiga slightly due to a hardware limitation of the built-in RAM.
Bars&Pipes can also utilize a graphics card if you have one. This will make screen updates even faster, and will give you much more screen space.
WinUAE, the !Amiga !emulator will also run Bars&Pipes. Emulation, though, is never guaranteed to work as well as the real thing.
Very good indeed. The !MIDI timing is very solid as it runs from an audio interrupt, thus being free of the processor. Even if the processor is being used up totally for other tasks, and the !Amiga cannot keep up with the amount of !MIDI data, Bars&Pipes will still not speed up or slow down.
The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.
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