[linux-audio-dev] Basic MIDI question

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

On Monday, 24 July 2006 16:38, Lee Revell wrote:
> Take the sequence "80 3D 35  31 80 3A 39  0E 80 37 31  03 80 31 1F" in
> the first line for example.  I know that 0x80 is note-off, and 0x3D are
> note number and 0x35 the velocity of the note-off.  But what the heck is
> the next byte, 0x31?  

Delta time of the next event, in variable length representation.

> The MIDI standard says note-off is one status byte 
> followed by 2 data bytes!

SMF (Standard MIDI File) format must store timestamped events, which the MIDI 
protocol (over the wire) doesn't care. There is a good reference of SMF 
format here: http://borg.com/~jglatt/tech/midifile.htm

You may want to try some SMF-to-text conversion utility:
http://alsa.opensrc.org/MidiComp

Regards,
Pedro