[LAU] A text-only environment for composing electronic music?

[Mario Lang]

Alexandre Ratchov <alex at caoua.org> writes:

> On Wed, Feb 05, 2014 at 11:13:23AM +0100, Mario Lang wrote:
>> "Patrick Shirkey" <pshirkey at boosthardware.com> writes:
>> 
>> > On Wed, February 5, 2014 12:31 am, Mario Lang wrote:
>> >> raf <rmouneyres at gmail.com> writes:
>> >>
>> >>> Hello,
>> >>>
>> >>> you'l probably be happy to know the existence of three great tools :
>> >>> midish, linuxsampler and Nama.
>> >>> 1) midish is a command line midi sequencer with a lot of great features
>> >>> http://www.midish.org/
>> >>
>> >> midish looks rather interesting.  However, the manual.html basically
>> >> just explains how to record data from an input device.  Does latest
>> >> midish support creating MIDI data from scratch, and if so, is there
>> >> perhaps some examples on how to do that?
>> >>
>> >
>> > Check this section :
>> >
>> > http://www.midish.org/manual.html#ev
>> >
>> > You can compose note on/off events and save the sequence as a song or
>> > export the song to .mid
>> 
>> A simple example on how to actually do that would be appreciated.
>
> Hi,
>
> It's kinda painful, as the tool was designed to work with an input
> device.
>
> You could create a track and add events one by one, ex:
>
> onew piano {0 0}
> tnew mytrack
> taddev 1 0 0 {non piano 64 90}
> taddev 1 1 0 {noff piano 64 0}
>
> see:
> http://www.midish.org/manual.html#func_taddev
> http://www.midish.org/manual.html#ev_ev
>
> you'll get warnings about unterminated notes and/or other
> anomalies, that you can ignore until all events are added. Once
> you're done, you could run tcheck to fix any anomaly, just in case.

OH, that last paragraph was helpful.  I was actually taken aback by the
warnings when I did my own (incomplete) attempt to duplicate your example above.

While I see (now) that midish was originally designed for a different use case
(direct MIDI input) I still think it might be helpful for others to add
a section to the manual which basically contains your posting I am
replying to :-).  The basic example on how to create MIDI events from
scratch, and maybe a paragraph about why it is so cumbersome
and a reference to tcheck regarding the warnings, would
have been everything I needed when I read the manual :-).
And mind you, I actually *read the manual* :-)

> To make the process less painful, you could define routines to make
> certain things automatic, depending on your needs.

I will look into this, but honestly, from the syntax above, it
doesn't look like midish can fullfil my requirements as explain in the
beginning of this thread.  I have learnt alot about its potential uses
though, so this was productive, thank you.

-- 
CYa,
  ⡍⠁⠗⠊⠕