Opcode OMS

This is an article culled from archive material, circa 1997.

OMS was originally the proprietary Opcode MIDI System, complete with expensive licensing and documentation, before political manouvering and an inspired bluff by Mark of the Unicorn led to a rebadging as the Open Music System. It was developed by Doug Wyatt with some of the original developers of Apple's MIDI Manager. I tend to regard it as a sophisticated version of MIDI Manager, with good support for assorted interfaces, and centralised storage of MIDI device names and locations. In addition, OMS supports MIDI Manager by emulating a MIDI Manager driver (as shown on the MIDI Manager page), so that MIDI Manager's inter-application routing can be used between OMS applications. (OMS 1.2.3 does not support IAC directly.)

When configured with an interface such as the Studio 4, OMS also provides an extensive (if very slightly buggy) MIDI routing/processing package which effectively turns any keyboard into a sophisticated controller. (Since OMS does all the work with the Studio 4, I wonder why this functionality is not provided for conventional interfaces?)

OMS offered the first solution to the infamous "PowerBook MIDI problems" about which much has been written, most of it factually incorrect. Having purchased a PowerBook 170 having been told by Apple that a (hardware) fix for the problem was "in the works" (and having subsequently bought a PowerBook 100 as an interim solution, since the '100 did MIDI reliably out of the box), I owe a debt to Doug Wyatt for spending so much time and effort in order to nail this problem.

OMS version 2 is now freely available from Opcode. I have no interest in it, partly because it offers me nothing I need, partly because it no longer runs on a 68000-based machine like the PowerBook 100, and partly because it is becoming big and complicated, complete with "cool icons". OMS

provides everything I need.