LimeLight(tm) Demo Version 1.52 README.TXT Copyright 1994 by BeBop Systems, All Rights Reserved Requirements LimeLight(tm) and this LimeLight Demo requires VGA Graphics (preferably color) and a Mouse. A MIDI interface and external keyboard or sound module is required to record or play back the song sequences. A hard disk and '286 or faster CPU are recommended. Demo Limitations This demo version of LimeLight does not save and only prints the first page (first eight measures) of the sequence. And of course, it doesn't have our terrific user manual with tutorial. Where to buy LimeLight LimeLight is only $99.95! Why pay more and get less? It comes with a 96 page manual which includes a tutorial with sheet music. LimeLight is available worldwide at better music and computer dealers that specialize in music software. If your favorite local dealer does not have LimeLight, tell them to call joel Sampson MIDI Source at 214-328-2730. Support your local, full-service dealer! You can also order LimeLight direct from BeBop Systems at 1-800-775-5557 or 214-320-2723. Our fax is 214-328-6909. Our free computer BBS, OMNI-NET is at 214-328-6909. The BBS supports 1200 to 14,400 bps, use 8N1. We will also have a corporate mailbox on CompuServe soon. Support Our support engineers are located in another building. Their phone number is (214) 385-9219. The support fax is (214) 385-9269. You can also get support via our bulletin board. What's New in Version 1.5 The latest version of LimeLight features support for most popular MIDI interfaces. It has a new setup program (LIMESET), enhanced record filter, input MIDI channel bump and enhanced real-time message and sync support. MIDI Interfaces Supported LimeLight supports the following MIDI interfaces: None (you can look at LimeLight, edit files and print, but not play or record), MPU-401 (still the industry standard). Use the MPU-401 setting for Sound Blaster 16 and Wave Blaster. We also support the Key MS-101, MS-103 and MS-124 external serial interfaces, Sound Blaster Pro, Media Vision, and all Music Quest interfaces including the PC MIDI Card and MQX-32M cards and parallel external interfaces 2 Port/SE, Note/1, Note/1+. You can also use some sound modules and keyboards with a built-in serial interface, such as the Yamaha TG-100, Roland SCC-7 and others. NOTE: If you use a sound card, you MUST have the MIDI cable adapter and an external MIDI keyboard or sound module. We do not play the built-in FM sounds, they just don't sound very good! We do play some high-end cards that use a MPU-401 to control on-board sounds. This includes the Roland SCC-1 and Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 with the Wave Blaster option. Introduction LimeLight is a powerful, easy-to-use graphical MIDI sequencer for MS-DOS. A great deal of time and effort was given to designing the user interface and feature list. We wanted LimeLight to have all the features necessary for music production, but still be intuitive, consistent and fun to use. Most musical data can be viewed and edited both graphically and numerically in a variety of ways with LimeLight. MIDI is an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. MIDI allows various makes of computers and musical instruments to communicate and be used together. The MIDI standard lets you to get the most out of your musical equipment, helps to prevent obsolescence and adds a great deal of versatility and power. Just what is a sequencer? A software sequencer works with music much the same the way a word processor works with words. LimeLight allows you enter music in a variety of ways, real-time with a MIDI keyboard or other MIDI controller, step-enter a note or chord at a time with a MIDI keyboard, or with the mouse. You can view and edit the musical data in a variety of views. When completed, you play the sequenced music back live exactly the way you want it. LimeLight also works with other music software, such as notation software which can print complex musical scores. LimeLight has the built-in capability of printing a "rough draft" of a single grand staff track, which is very useful. The LimeLight sequencing software uses VGA graphics and a mouse to display and edit the data in a graphical representation. It's a much easier to use than numeric text based software of the past. LimeLight uses Apple Macintosh hot keys on the computer keyboard. Mac hotkeys are consistent and commonly used with many other PC and Mac software today. Hot keys make LimeLight even faster to use once you have mastered it using the mouse. The power of LimeLight is the note entry and editing functions which can compensate for lack of musical technical ability or even physical limitations if you have a disability. You can quickly fix mistakes, change the tempo, enter notes one at a time or use other tools to create a musical work. If you can "hear" a musical arrangement, you can create it! Skilled musicians will find LimeLight an even more valuable and creative musical tool. It lets you concentrate on your music, not the software. LimeLight is useful to professional musicians, studios, students, hobbyist, and anyone interested in music, regardless of their music or computer skills. Corporate users and media professionals working in multimedia, film, television or radio can use LimeLight to modify and customize existing musical sequences. Sequences are available commercially or in public domain, typically from computer bulletin board systems. These "canned" sequences can be customized by non-musicians for a sound track just right for your project. Since the computer controls the musical instruments, MIDI is always played live without the degradation that occurs when recording to analog tape or the tremendous overhead of storing sound on computer disk. This live capability also gives a performer versatility on playback. The tempo, pitch, timbre and other parameters that can be changed in real-time while the sequence is playing. Demo Setup LimeLight requires an IBM-compatible computer with VGA graphics and a mouse. A hard disk is highly recommended, although it can be used with a 720k or larger floppy disk. A supported MIDI interface is required to record or play music. After you successfully install LimeLight to your disk, you must use the LIMESET.EXE program to configure LimeLight for your particular hardware. Type LIMESET to run the setup program. Use the mouse or up and down arrows to change fields and the plus and minus keys to switch values of each field. Specify your type of MIDI interface and hardware configuration. The default values are usually appropriate unless you had to change the settings on your MIDI interface because of a hardware conflict. You also specify your printer so LimeLight can print music. Most printers can emulate one of the selections given, check your printer manual. You also specify your VGA type, typically COLOR. LimeLight can also work with monochrome or LCD black and white VGA displays. Type Alt-S to save the data and Alt-Q to exit LIMESET and return to DOS. Pull-down Menus The Pull Down menus in Limelight are located on the top line of all screens. Most of the operations can be executed from all screens, although some may more practical to use with a particular window. Many of the common commands have hotkey shortcuts to make LimeLight easier and faster to use. Hotkeys are listed to the right of commands in the pull down menu, so you will learn them after you use LimeLight for a while. LimeLight Windows Transport Window The transport screen is the lower portion of all LimeLight views. It's called the transport because it has stop, record, play, rewind and fast forward buttons, similar to an audio or video tape transport. Track Window The Track Window (F5) is the default window and one of the most frequently used views. It displays and allows the editing of many "global" values, values that affect a track for the entire sequence. An example is MIDI channel or transpose. LimeLight has 72 individual tracks and you will probably run out of computer memory before you run out of tracks. The track you are currently on is indicated by a large red triangle in the far left, it is also displayed numerically in the lower right of the transport portion of the screen. LimeLight begins pointing to track one. You can select multiple tracks for some operations, and the selected tracks will be marked by a smaller red triangle. A black rectangle around a field indicates a selected field and current track. Mixer Window The MIDI Mixer window (F6) in LimeLight is unique and exciting. It emulates a conventional audio mixing board and in some MIDI studios can even replace an expensive audio console. Your mixing can be recorded to automate complex changes. You can switch to the Mixer window by pulling down Window and Mixer or pressing the F6 key. The mixer is labeled 1 to 16, for the 16 MIDI channels. The 16 volume sliders control the volume on that MIDI channel. Most instruments respond to MIDI volume, which is MIDI controller 7. You simply grab the slider with the mouse, hold the left button down and move the slider up to increase the volume and down to decrease the volume. The green "LED" indicators on top indicate data activity and relative loudness on that channel and can help to indicate which MIDI channels are active. The volume sliders can also be ganged or combined to allow smooth fades on several channels. To gang (or ungang) a slider, double click the left mouse button or single click the right mouse button on each slider to be ganged. The right mouse button is easier to use if the sequence is playing. Ganged sliders will be indicated in red. The Master slider on the right controls all ganged volume sliders. Click on Gang Off to return the sliders to normal. Piano Roll Window The Piano Roll Window (F9) displays and allows editing of MIDI data at the note level. This window is similar to a player piano roll on its side. A note, indicated by a blue bar, is the equivalent of a hole in a piano roll. This view displays and allows editing of notes of any value, including "non-standard" lengths. It has zoom capability and can show all 88-notes of a piano. Note Window The Note Window (F9) of LimeLight is a natural way to look at music. Notes displayed on the grand staff help to find mistakes as well as do harmonic and other analysis. Step entry is also performed in the Note window. Many aspects of the Note window are similar to the Piano roll window. The music in Note window is always displayed as two measures of a grand staff. The music is automatically generated by the data in the sequence. It is quantized for the screen only, so songs entered in real-time may not have the exact starting times and durations as notated. Also enharmonic notes, C# versus Db, may not be displayed like the original music. This is not possible with just the MIDI data, since C# and Db have the same MIDI note number. The key of C and sharp keys use sharps and naturals while flat keys use flats and naturals. The blue dashed line indicates beats and the green dashed lines indicate subbeats, sixteenth notes in 4/4. The number of subbeats is 16 divided by the denominator of the time signature. The Note window has four modes of operation selected with an icon: edit, erase, insert and step. Before editing or creating a new song you should set the proper time signature with the Misc Key signature... pull down menu and the time signature with the Misc Time signature.... These two setting greatly affect the Note window. The edit mode is used to correct mistakes by moving notes. To select the edit mode click on the arrow icon in the toolbox. Choose a note on the staff, click and hold the right button of the mouse, which selects the note and turns the note red in color. You can move the note up and down to change the pitch or left and right to change its timing. If you double click on a note a dialog box will pop up. The box allows you to change the duration or velocity of the individual note. If a note is moved outside its original "column" it will be quantized For music entered in real-time, this may not be the desired result. To change a note in pitch but keep the original starting and durations, you can move the note up and down but must stay within the column. This property can also be used to quickly quantize single notes. To quantize a note, move it outside the original column and back to the desired location. To add an accidental, either sharp, flat or natural, click the mouse on the desired accidental icon and then click on the note to be changed. Since LimeLight automatically notates from the MIDI data stream, sharp keys and the key of C can have sharps but not flats, and flat keys will have flats but not sharps. This means you may have to use an enharmonic equivalent, for example a C# instead of a Db. If you want to delete a note, click on the rectangular eraser tool and click on a note to delete it. If you make a mistake, you can undelete it with the Edit Undo command. The insert command is chosen with the pencil icon. Select the note or rest duration, whole note to sixteenth note. Then simply click the left mouse button to enter a note in the desired location. You cannot insert two notes in same location, if you try LimeLight will "beep" the speaker. However, you can move a note into the same location as another. If you make a mistake when entering a note, click on the arrow edit tool and move the note or rest into the desired location or Undo the error. The note window is also used for step entry mode. Step entry allows slow, non-real-time entry of notes with a MIDI keyboard or other MIDI input device. To begin step mode, click on the step icon and pick the duration of the note. The numeric hotkeys 1 to 6 select a note duration, just like insert mode mentioned above. To step enter a single note, simply play that note in and it will be displayed on the screen. To enter a chord press and hold down at least one note while you play the other notes of the chord. When you release all keys, the chord will be entered. This makes it possible to enter spread chords your fingers can not simultaneously play. With one hand playing keyboard and the other on the computer keyboard or mouse choosing note values you can enter music quickly and at your own pace. There are two kinds of rests in LimeLight. You can manually place a rests or you can automatically "Guess Rests." Manually placed rests are inserted, edited and erased just like notes. They will show as a solid black color. To automatically insert rests, pull down the Misc and click on Guess/Re-guess rests. You will have the option to Guess/Re-guess rests or Delete guessed rests. The Guess/Re-guess option will automatically estimate and insert rests. Guessed rests show as gray in color. You can delete all guessed rests with the Delete guessed rest selection. If a guess rest is not what you want, you can use the edit mode of the note window and move the gray guessed rests. That turns them into a manual placed rest, black in color, which will not be automatically deleted with the Delete guessed rest option. You can also print out the staves shown in the note windows. LimeLight prints a "rough draft" of the screen and does not do desktop music publishing. For advanced publishing, write a Standard MIDI File with LimeLight and import it into a music notation program to combine staves and add lyrics and notation markings. THIS DEMO VERSION OF LimeLight ONLY PRINTS THE FIRST PAGE. The production version prints any number of pages. However, the printing capability is very useful as you can check your work or play it from the printed music. Make sure you have the selected the correct printer in LIMESET, the LimeLight setup program. The Print functions only work when you are in the Note window. To print, pull down the File pull down and click on Print staff.... You are given the choice to print All, the entire song or Partial with a set range of measures. Click the mouse on Print and the staves should be printed to your printer two measures across with three (with a dot-matrix printer) or four (with a laser or ink jet printer) grand staves per 8.5 x 11 inch page. Event Window The Event List Window (F10) of LimeLight displays a numeric view of the MIDI data. While the graphical editing windows of LimeLight may be easier to use, the event list is the most precise way to view and edit very fine detail. It is also the closest to the actual MIDI data stream transmitted through the OUT port of the MIDI interface. The track, MIDI channel, event time, event type and event data are displayed. Different event types will have different amounts of data, from one to three bytes. Other Windows There are three other graphical editing windows for LimeLight: Velocity, Pitch Bend and Controllers. These three windows are similar and make editing the parameters that make music expressive visual rather than a list of numbers. The three windows have a similar user interface. The upper left of the windows displays the Time and Velocity of the mouse cursor position. The Zoom IN and OUT box will vary the zoom, as will the hotkeys [ for zoom in and ] for zoom out. You can view and edit data in 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 measure views. A ruler of valid values is displayed on the right and the measure numbers are displayed on the bottom. Troubleshooting the LimeLight Demo Problem: No Sound at all. Check MIDI cables, make sure OUT is routed to IN. Check to make sure audio is turned on your keyboard. Try playing the built-in demo if the instrument has one. Sequence and instrument not on the same MIDI channel. Make sure MIDI Thru is turned on within LimeLight. MIDI interface not setup correctly. Problem: Get the wrong sound. Make sure the MIDI channel and patch numbers are set correctly in LimeLight and/or your instrument. Problem: Note doubling or loss of polyphony. Turn MIDI Thru off within LimeLight. Problem: No metronome sound. Make sure the metronome is turned on within LimeLight. Setup the MIDI metronome with LIMESET.EXE. You must set the channel, note numbers and velocities. Problem: Printer prints garbage or does not print. Run the LimeLight setup program, LIMESET.EXE and make sure the printer and printer port are correct. Problem: Invalid Video Configuration message displayed during startup. A VGA adapter has not been found. VGA graphics are required for LimeLight. Problem: Mouse Not found. The mouse or mouse driver was not found. A Microsoft compatible mouse is required for LimeLight. Check to make sure your mouse is plugged in the and the drivers that came with the mouse are installed properly. Problem: MIDI Interface Not found. The set MIDI interface has not been found. Run the LimeLight setup program, LIMESET.EXE and make sure the MIDI Interface type and other parameters are set correctly.