This month --- playing MIDI files within a stack.
With all of its multimedia promise, surely there must be a way to play MIDI files created by students with an electronic keyboard. After all, what better way for students to create an electronic portfolio of their original performances. Although Hyperstudio only natively plays WAV files, here are a couple of suggestions.....
WAVMaker for Windows
One
alternative is to take your MIDI file and convert it to WAV format.
I originally didn't think it was possible until I ran across this program.
You can download it from http://www.abc.se/~m9303.
But, before you fire up your browser to do so, read on. I downloaded
the program (it comes from Sweden) and converted a MIDI file to WAV format.
I was VERY surprised to find that the resulting
file was 12MB (yes megabytes) in size. Once created, the file does
play extremely nicely and there may just be cases where you can justify
creating a file of this size. I don't think that most people have
the hard drive space to do it on a regular basis though.
Just Run a Media Player
Here's
another way. You'll probably be creating a card in your stack with
the student's interpretation or explanation of the music on it. Then,
there might just be a button labelled "Click here to play".
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When you get to the button editing screen, select "Another program..." from the "Places to Go" side of the screen. |
| Hyperstudio will next prompt you with
the "Launch Options".
Here, just select the MIDI file to play. I chose the "canned" canyon.mid that comes with Windows. As well, select the application that will play the MIDI file. I elected to use the Media Player that comes with Windows. It does a great job. |
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Granted,
the person running the program will have to press the play button with
the mouse and close off the media player when they are done. But,
in the meantime, students can use the multimedia function of your computer
to present their original works.
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