Martin Russ feels the need for speed, and reminds readers of the often overlooked benefits of using macros...
One of the things that's always annoyed me about modern computers is their inability to carry out repetitive tasks. In the days when you had to program a computer by issuing instructions via a teletype, or punched paper tape or cards, a little bit of programming would enable easy repetition of a calculation. But when you're faced with a mouse and menus, getting the computer to repeat even simple tasks can become a tedious and difficult feat of manual dexterity. Many sequencers suffer from this problem. I've often wondered why very few programs have a 'repeat last command' button, because I must have spent a large proportion of my time at the QWERTY keyboard repeating and then undoing (there is always an Undo key, of course!).
So, after a particularly onerous set of transpose dialogue boxes in my sequencer — Select notes, Command T, Return, Select different notes, Command T, Return, and so on — I decided that now was the time to look at automating things a little. A quick search through my cover‑CD festooned Mac magazine collection provided a shareware program and a review of a commercial alternative (QuicKeys). The shareware 'macro' program I found was KeyQuencer 1.2, and although it has now been replaced by a 'Lite' shareware version of the commercial KeyQuencer version 2.0 (and up), it shows that you can get considerable power for not very much money. It allows you to assemble a series of commands, and assign them to a single key‑press. The only catch is that, unlike the more expensive commercial key recorders, KeyQuencer requires you to do some scripting — but since you probably know what key‑presses you want to make, this isn't so difficult. And there are a host of special functions included in the scripting language to help you achieve things that aren't just a simple mouse‑click or key‑press away.
KeyQuencer 1.2 uses a remarkably small amount of my Mac's RAM, and it has been completely stable for over a month of hard usage. Learning how to script it wasn't very hard — the first macro that I produced did nothing more than reduce the 'Command T, Return' sequence I was using to open a dialogue box, and then close it, to a single press of a function key. Once I had the dialogue box set up to do the transposition, I could whizz along with the mouse, selecting the notes, hit F3, grab some more notes, hit F3, and so on. When I discovered that pressing the Tab key moved the cursor around in dialogue boxes, it wasn't long before I was writing macros to select the top line out of a track, or hocket notes in time. These are all things that I do frequently, and I had always wished that there was some way of automating them...
At the risk of becoming a shareware evangelist, let me say that KeyQuencer is yet another wonderfully useful piece of software that doesn't cost the earth, yet can increase your productivity hugely. Even more important, when you aren't gnashing your teeth because you're repeating long, arcane and tedious sequences of key‑presses, your creativity improves. I'm sure there are lots of sequencer users out there whose lives could be improved by it.
You'll find KeyQuencer at: www. binarysoft.com/kqmac/ and QuicKeys at: www.cesoft.com.
Hard Work
There's no doubt that hard disks are continuing their headlong plunge in price, despite their increasing capacities. 2Gb for under £400 is no longer quite the bargain it was this time last year. But there's a hidden casualty when you use these large disks — your files!
I bet you thought that if a file had 200 bytes of data in it, it would be stored as a file with a length of 200 bytes, perhaps with a few extra bytes tagged on. And you would be wrong. In fact, ludicrous though it sounds, there is a limit on the minimum size of a file — and it changes depending on the size of the hard disk you store it on!
For my smallest hard disk, a mere 15Mb, the smallest file size is 1K. This sounds OK until you examine the actual contents of a file. Saving a letter 'a' in a plain text file on the disk produced a file whose contents were a mere two bytes, but whose actual size was more than 500 times bigger! On my largest hard disk (a 2Gb AV drive), things are even worse — a minimum file size of 33K. Storing several small files on a large hard disk is often nothing more than throwing away useful space and filling it with padding.
If you're wondering, the formula works out at something like:
Minimum file size = Hard disk size x 0.166
Where the file size is in kilobytes, and the hard disk size is in megabytes. The significance of this formula depends on the typical size of the files that you work with. If you use a digital audio hard disk recorder system, you may well have lots of large files, and the wastage on a 'gig' hard disk will be minimal. But if you produce lots of small MIDI files, utility programmes, MAX scripts, or tiny 'READ ME' files, you may be expending large amounts of hard disk space to store only a comparatively small number of bytes.
One solution to this is to buy more hard disk space and accept that for smaller files, significant amounts will be wasted. But a much neater solution is to partition (split) a single large hard disk into several smaller ones by using special formatting software. Choosing the partition size to suit the expected file size isn't difficult. For example, if your files are around 100K, partitioning a disk into several 'project' named areas of about a CD's capacity (650Mb) will give minimum file sizes of around 10K — so the average wastage is going to be only about 10%. For tiny text and MIDI files, even smaller partitions may be better.