Beginner needs help!

[E.G.Newton@iti.salford.ac.uk]

Thanks alot to <areece@merle.acns.nwu.edu> for posing the question about
his problems building cm. I had the same problem to and many many thanks
to Rick Taube for suggesting the error. It came up with an error in the
:csound syntax and so I deleted that and the :midi build worked fine
much to my amazement since I have been trying since June.

Anyway now that it works I have just a few questions if anyone could help
me out I would be very grateful:-

1. None of the manuals for clisp are in ASCII so I am kind of at a loss.
Does anyone know of a translator/viewer program or does anyone have files
already in ASCII?

2. Is it possible to call a DOS shell from within stella/clisp? If so
could it run csound, or would there be memory problems?

3. When I type quit from stella I get placed at '>' prompt. Whatever
I then type seems to put me in the debugger Break-1 >. How do you
exit at this stage. I'm sure I've tried everything, and I always
have to reset the machine, which is not very practical!

4. I know little about this but is it possible to do anything with channel
information of MIDI ie. channel = instrument. I think MIDI 0 is
'channel-less', and MIDI 1 is not supported? Is this correct and if so
what do most users do? It said in the manual that channels were about
to be supported as threads. Does anyone know anything about this?

Stella is just what I have been looking for in terms of a composition
system and I hope that I can sort out these problems. Congratualations
to the people who have worked on making it so flexible and usable.

--Liz.

E.G.Newton@iti.salford.ac.uk