[LAU] Command-line midi player with fast forward, pause, rewind?

[Ken Restivo]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 03:11:52PM +0200, Alexandre Ratchov wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 11:06:51PM -0700, Ken Restivo wrote:
> > I'd love to find a command-line MIDI file player that will
> > use ALSA MIDI (not its own internal synth), and also will
> > accept arrow keys or some other key commands on stdin to
> > fastforward, rewind, pause, play, etc.
> > 
> 
> recent midish versions can almost do that, but not with the
> arrow keys, unfortunately.  It's controlled from stdin,
> supports start/stop and relocate (for rewind/fastforward).
> 
> ex:
> 
> 	dnew 0 "28:0" wo	# use 28:0 port for output
> 	import "myfile.mid"	# import file to play
> 	p			# play
> 	s			# stop
> 	g 17			# go to measure #17
> 
> when you change the position, it restores the states of all 
> controllers and handles the note-off events of skipped
> notes.
> 

Thanks, I've build the latest version, and used it a bit so far, and I like it a lot, it does indeed do pretty much what I want.

It looks like it could also do a lot of useful stuff, but I find it bewildering and the documentation not quite complete.

A few questions, if I may?

1) How do you get it to pause? Not stop, which is "s", and then it resets the position back to zero, but just momentarily pause and keep the position at wherever it is at?

2) How can I route output to a different channel when I'm *playing* a MIDI file? I found documentation on how to route and filter when recording, but I need to do the filtering/routing at playback time.

3) Is there any rudimentary editing capability? i.e., cut the file keeping only events from range X-Y and J-K?

I'd also like to try out Julien's modified C++ version of it too.

Thanks to you and Julien for reccommending midish.

-ken