1. Use any of the included protein text files which will show up when you click the Open button. Sequence data from online data bases like SwissProt (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/textonly/swisshome.html) or GenBank (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) may be copied and pasted into text files, or may be pasted directly into the text edit window using the mouse right click.
When copying sequence text files, it is recommended that you save the sequence data into the default Bio2Midi directory, however you may use the Open and Save windows to navagate to any directory available to your computer, including network directories.
2. Load the text file into the Bio2Midi text screen with the Open button. You may wish to edit the text files so that they contain only the protein or the DNA sequence you wish to convert, but this is not necessary as Bio2MIDI can ignore the non sequence text.
3. Mark the sequence you wish to convert by placing a tilde (~) at the beginning and end of the sequence. For example the marked myosin sequence would look like this using a tilde:
~APKKDVKKPV AAAAAAPAPA PAPAPAPAPA KPKEEKIDLS AIKIEFSKEQ QDEFKEAFLL FDRTGDSKIT LSQVGDVLRA LGTNPTNAEV RKVLGNPSNE ELNAKKIEFE QFLPMMQAIS NNKDQATYED FVEGLRVFDK EGNGTVMGAE LRHVLATLGE KMKEEEVEAL MAGQEDSNGC INYEAFVKHI MSI~
The Bio2Midi program will ignore numbers, spaces and all text in the file except for that enclosed between the markers, so you can leave whatever informational material you like in the file. However you must insert the tilde (~) markers in order to complete the translation to MIDI. Note that markers have already been inserted in the example files.
4. You do not need to save the marked working sequence text in order to translate it into MIDI, but you may. Use the Save button to save it under its original name or to save it under a new file name or directory.
5. Select your prefered MIDI instrument and paly back options (see Controls page), then click on the >MIDI button to translate to MIDI and play it.
If you are working with protein files, proceed to Step 6. DNA files optionally require making some additional choices. See Marking DNA Files for additional information on marking DNA files.
6. Click on the Audition button to generate a MIDI file using the choices you have made. If you want to make playback changes, just make them and click on Audition again to hear the results of your changes. Bio2Midi will save your last set of choices in a MIDI file with the same name as your text file.
Bio2MIDI does not play MIDI files directly, rather it creates the .mid file, then hands it off to your default MIDI file player. Usually this will be the same MIDI player you use with your web browser. If you do not have a MIDI file player configured, you may use mplayer.exe, which is located in your Windows directory.
7. To make multiple files using different playback choices, you may rename each MIDI file to avoid the last one being overwritten by the next version, or you may use the Save button to save several versions of your protein file. In each file, select the Playback options you wish to use and then click on >MIDI to create the midi file that plays these choices. You may wish to make notes in the text file about the Instrument#, Tempo, and Transpose choices you have selected for the MIDI file of the same name.
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