NO RESPECT: OPCODE OMS
Jan 1, 2006 12:00 PM, by Doug Eisengrein
For those whose entire Macintosh audio experience is on a G4 or newer box or for you fortunate (did I just say that?) Windows-only souls out there, the little three-letter acronym OMS might not mean anything. For the adventuresome, it might just be the name of your favorite scuba-equipment manufacturer. But if you've been involved in audio since before Apple began naming its operating system after large ferocious felines, then you no doubt know exactly what those pesky initials OMS stand for: Open Music System.
You see, once upon a time, getting a MIDI controller or module to work with your computer was not as automatic (or pleasant) as plugging in a USB cable and watching the device magically appear, ready for use, in your Audio MIDI Setup. At the dawn of the '90s, rather than autodetecting USB MIDI keyboards and interfaces, Macs used OMS to attempt to locate your connected devices — originally, by searching the printer and modem serial ports! If you've never used OMS or Mac OS Classic, then even “printer and modem ports” might have you scratching your head.
The now-defunct Opcode Systems and programmer Doug Wyatt developed OMS, which originally stood for Opcode Music System before changing to Open Music System to better reflect the open-source spirit of its development. A third-party piece of freeware, OMS enabled all manner of MIDI and audio sequencing software to communicate with MIDI hardware devices, interfaces and even early versions of Apple's QuickTime Music. After its inception in 1990, OMS quickly became to Mac OS Classic what Core MIDI is to Mac OS X today.
Fairly soon after its development, OMS became an unofficial industry standard, and just about every box of music software out there adopted it as the portal through which it communicated via MIDI. Drivers surfaced for every conceivable MIDI interface on the market. Conceptually, it worked like Mac OS X Core MIDI: You could ask it to autodetect devices, and it would search your ports for all things connected. If an interface's drivers were well-written (which seemed to often not be the case), it would display different MIDI ports available and (hopefully) show what was attached to them. Users could manually add devices, name them and choose among a library of icons, as well as save entire studio-setup schematics — in much the same way Mac OS X automatically does that for you now.
Although never making it even to version 3, OMS was under constant development, slowly and persistently progressing from version 1 to 2.3.1 and so on until a corporate-merger mess caused it to officially fold in 1999 with version 2.3.8. But the problem with OMS, its various drivers or perhaps just Mac OS Classic in general was that it crashed — constantly. In my formative Mac-based music experience, I spent far more time performing OMS troubleshooting and tech support for myself and a handful of friends than I did actually making music with it.
Although OMS did manage to compile a huge built-in library of hardware interfaces, sound modules, keyboards and so forth — not to mention support from just about every major and not-so-major manufacturer — over time (especially during its last days of slow, painful death), OMS aided me more in grinding my teeth into dust than assisting me in the pursuit of carefree electronic-music making. It went something like this: Version 2.3.6 didn't work with my studio properly, so I upgraded to version 2.3.8, which worked until I added a new piece of studio gear. Then, the new drivers crashed OMS, so I had to roll back to version 2.3.7. That worked, but I then had to create a New Studio Setup because my previously saved one wasn't being recognized. And that process required maybe 10 or 15 presses of the dreaded force-restart button between my feeble attempts to reconfigure countless combinations of Extensions in the System Folder in search of that delicate eggshell of a collective that would play nice together — that week.
Sometimes after such inspiration-shattering marathons, I was left staring blankly at the screen, hands idle on the keyboard, babbling incoherently with a string of drool hanging from my lip. Other times, I was nearly wanted for attempted manslaughter after throwing an Apple Quadra or Power PC 7100 (along with my battered-into-submission ego) onto the street below my studio, narrowly missing an elderly couple. It's a miracle I am even in front of a computer screen right now and not living somewhere out in the forest with the Rainbow Family.
I did not write code for OMS; for Mac OS 7, OS 8 or OS 9; or for any of the OMS drivers. I'm not sure if OMS, Mac OS Classic or the many related drivers were responsible for the constant bugs that caused my near insanity, but one thing is for certain: Mac users should bow down at the altar of Mac OS X for the magic that it has accomplished for electronic musicians. And as for Doug Wyatt, the original author of OMS, he's still out there, still creating software for music purposes — in fact, word on the street has it that Wyatt had more than a little something to do with the implementation of Mac OS X Core Audio and MIDI.
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