[linux-audio-user] midi automation and scripting tools?

[Mark Constable]

On Wednesday 18 May 2005 09:43, Stuart Allie wrote:
> > > I'm looking for tools that can do things like this to a midi
> > > file: "take all the kick drum notes from bars 9 to 16 and
> > > shift them  forward in time by 2 ticks"
> > 
> > Code in MusE does some of these things. The user interface for
> > doing them is not very polished at this time and I wasn't able
> > to do them easily. the nice thing about muse is that the data
> > is stored in an xml file that I could edit which got me out of
> > my predicament which required me to lose all my pitch bend events.
> 
> Thanks. I've looked at the midi transform tool in muse... it does *some*
> of the things I want. Perhaps I should look at adding some sort of
> scripting to muse to do the rest. It would be nice to make use of an
> existing framework and to be able to do things inside an existing editor
> rather than doing the "save to midi file, run some program, reload the
> midi file" thing.

A crude but extremely simple option is to use midicomp and
tweak the ascii output anywhich way you care to with any
scripting language on the planet. Sure, there is no GUI and
it's only a one shot process but there is nothing you could
not do to a MIDI file with some persistence. What is a total
bonus is that once a technique is perfected then it can be
easily batched, ie; to normalize the volume settings of any
MIDI file, to always put the kick drum dead center, change
any kick1 to kick2... and so on. I used to have a bunch of
macros and scripts for Kate (KDE editor) that made working
with the intermediate ascii output quite easy... I could
make changes and one menu option would pipe the changes
thru midicomp -c and then into timidity so I could preview
changes directly from Kate.

midicomp some.mid | somefilter arg1 arg2 | midicomp -c some2.mid

http://midicomp.opensrc.org/

--markc