NotePlayer Kit
Author: Dan Vanderkam
Price: <free>
Download:
Realbasic Café (Hotline), Dan's site

  Have you ever tried to make a program with the noteplayer control? If not, then let me just tell you this: It sucks. First you have to play a note using a numeric value. Then you have to set the velocity of the note, and to top it all of you have to stop it using a timer or a thread. Try to make a symphony with that!

  The first time I tried Noteplayer, I was amazed by the fact that it was so much easier than RB's note player, and it used Parseline, which is similiar to the "Play" command which is well known to anyone who programmed in GW-Basic or QBasic. Enough sobering about the old days though. Noteplayer does what it is suposed to do, no more, no less. For example, I was able to produce a nice little graphics keyboard with little code (But a lot of copy and pasting...).

  As an extra bonus, you get a listbox class and a popup class to help make the selection of an instrument very, very easy. This alone is very valuable for any one making a music program.

  Let's talk about how it works. You give it a string containing the notes to play seprated by spaces like "C D E F G A", and ask it to play it. There are a few more commands for setting the tempo, pausing and that kind of stuff. If you do not know a little about music and notes in the real world, then you won't get much out of Noteplayer

  All in all, I rather like noteplayer. It has some nice features, and an easy way of using them. I give it a 7.5.

- Review by Oliver Kofoed Pederson (Pixel)

 Pros: Gives a very easy way of playing notes. The popup and listbox classes realy are gold when you are writing a music program.
 Cons: It does have four classes... There aren't any real cons, since it's a limited thing. All it does is play notes, but sometimes that is more then enough.
Rating: 7.5
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