Mac Mini, MIDI and monitorless use

Tonight was frustrating all around.  It totally sucks when your programming and the equipment is all set up correctly and then what appears to be an OS issue gets in the way.  We have a brand new Mac mini running OS 10.7x for driving installations.  Works great until we unplug the monitor.  Once that happens the MIDI stream freaks out, slows down or otherwise doesn't do its job.

After doing web searches and trying various attempts to "trick " the computer, I opted to take apart a cheap VGA flat screen so we can fit it in the security box.  A student show is being installed and failure is not an option.  How demoralizing would it be to get all that stuff in order and then be defeated so capriciously.  I am a firm believer in testing and making sure stuff works.  It is awful to walk into an interactive show and then not understand what is going on or to have the interactivity not function because of a computer crash etc.  Things must work!

So,   the immediate problem appears solved.  Now to find out a real solution.  I have posted to cycling74's forum and am crossing my fingers hoping an answer will be forthcoming.

Miditron and Potentiometer

Made some excellent progress this evening.  The Miditron PDF is pretty thorough and simple, this is why I couldn't quite figure why it wasn't performing the way I expected.  We had a photo-resistor in terminal one that I could only get to read in digital mode.  It just wouldn't give any information when set to analogue in.  I had assumed that this was because I didn't know the resistance of the component.  Tonight we had the photo cell in terminal one and a 100k ohm Pot in terminal 3.  Not working except in digital mode.  After re-reading the documentation we moved it to terminal 2 as the terminals must be used in sequence.  After this also failed, I reset the board to factory default.  Instantly we were getting analogue readings on terminal one.  When I switched it to digital and and term 2 to analogue, term two did not read.  The lesson is the terminals must be set to the same mode to function.

After this minor discovery, we were good.  With the pot functioning I threw together a quick patch allowing the control of ann audio files playback speed.




Here is the image of the patch used for making the sounds.  Super simple.  Had terminal two set to "control change"  and used that to control the playback speed of the file via an SfPlay object.