[LAU] MIDI Input of LAU Applications

Gabriel M. Beddingfield gabriel at teuton.org
Mon May 18 10:13:50 EDT 2009


Hi Crypto,

I'm a Hydrogen dev, and am copying it to the hydrogen dev list.  I invite you to
continue the discussion over there.

Crypto wrote:
> I was stuck by the fact that an otherwise great application like hydrogen is 
> unable to perform a simple thing such as playing a fill-in via MIDI, although 
> it offers plenty of ways to play all sorts of MIDI sequences (I compare a fill-
> in to a sequence here). I know that hydrogen offers some commands such as 
> "start" and "stop", but that is not enough for what I would like to do. 
> hydrogen is like Edward Scissorhands without the human hands he should have 
> received. hydrogen could do it if it only had a more advanced MIDI handling.
> 
> Or to put it short:
> 
> Play a sequence as a fill-in: use computerkeyboard or mouse to start playing 
> it.
> How can I do the same thing in a live play environment from my MIDI organ? 
> Fiddling with mouse and notebook keyboard is no useful option.

The development version (and possibly 0.9.3) of Hydrogen has something very much 
like this, although it's totally undocumented as of yet.  When you put Hydrogen 
in Pattern Mode and allow "Live" mode or "Stacked" pattern mode, you can trigger 
individual patterns to start or stop playing based on MIDI input.  In addition, 
Hydrogen responds to MIDI program change events... mapping the program change to 
the pattern that you want triggered.

Note that this is very similar to features provided by the sequencers seq24 and
non-sequencer, as well as live looping programs like freewheeling and sooperlooper.

*  To get pattern mode, there's a widget at the top
    where you switch between "Song" and "Pattern".

*  To get "stacked" pattern mode...
    On the left, there's a listing of all the patterns
    that are currently loaded.  At the top of this list,
    and on the right, is a button called "stacked mode."
    Click it so that 3 lines appear (this enables stacked
    mode).

*  Using the GUI, you can add/remove patterns from
    the "currently playing" list by Ctrl+Click-ing
    the pattern.  The pattern will start playing
    on the next cycle (not immediately).

*  Using MIDI, sending a program change will select the
    pattern for the next cycle.  I don't know how well
    it works with stacked mode, and I think the patterns
    are numbered starting with 0, 1, 2, ....  Pattern #0
    is at the top of the list.

I've only recently discovered this feature... and I've never used it -- so let 
me know how it goes.

FWIW, I'm not a fan of using a PC for this... should have been a CC... but it is 
what it is.  :-)

HTH,
Gabriel




More information about the Linux-audio-user mailing list