MIDI Recorder/Player

Not me, but you might want to investigate Rosegarden.

--
Mike Fleming

On Wed, 13 Jul 2016 14:56:35 -0400, "J.B. Wood" declaimed the following:

My barely used Casio arranger keyboard has both floppy and SD card...

5-pin DIN for In and Out? Trickiest thing will be setting up the communications -- standard 5-pin MIDI is 8N1 at some odd 31.25kbps. Not many UARTs include that clock rate (While the Atari ST had built in MIDI ports, the Amiga serial port was designed to support MIDI speeds so only an adapter from RS-232 to MIDI was required)

--
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN 
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Easiest approach is surely a USB-MIDI interface, as long as Linux drivers are available for it.

Rats, I can't find the packaging. Perhaps I threw it out in a fit of housecleaning. Several years ago, I bought a USB-MIDI interface at a guitar store, and it worked perfectly. Based on that huge :-) statistical sample, odds would seem to be at least not hideously bad that Linux would drive a given model.

HTH

--
Robert Riches 
spamtrap42@jacob21819.net 
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

Hello, and it isn't a problem at least for a laptop via a USB port. I can presently use MIDI sequencing software on either Linux or PC platforms and record or play to the digital piano via an M-Audio MIDISPORT USB-to-MIDI interface. MIDISPORT support is already available in many Linux distros but for Windows 7 you have to download and install the driver. The simplest way on Linux to play a MIDI file is via "aplaymidi", albeit one MIDI file at a time (i.e. no playlist) and with no pause feature.

Newer musical instruments provide for MIDI-over-USB so maybe that would address the issue you raised. The "SD MiDi Controller" box from that UK company I previously mentioned has DIN MIDI In/Out. It's available in kit form and there are numerous photos of the circuit board and components but I can't tell what kind of processor (Raspberry Pi?) is being employed and no schematic appears to be available. Sincerely,

--
J. B. Wood	            e-mail: arl_123234@hotmail.com

Any "Standard Compliant" USB-MIDI should work in any Linux. (As I remember Yamaha is notorious for not being compliant, but e.g. any current M-Audio device should be fine.)

Just for total verification, I did a quickie experiment: connected my Axiom to my Pi through a powered hub (not sure whether the Pi would have enough oomph for a direct plug in), and ran aseqdump. Displayed incoming events a treat!

However. To do the test, I had to unplug my (text) keyboard. Trying to get both K/B and MIDI working at once through the bub was more of a headache. One or the other seemed to be inert. With a *lot* of unplugging and replugging into the hub, I finally got both, but it was a struggle. I assume bad connectors (not a hub I've used for a while) but I can't be sure.

-- Pete --

Huh. That could be a problem for DIN connections. In the old days I did just that -- made an opto-isolated serial port box that gave me fine MIDI on the Amiga, and it never struck me that the 31.5 Kbps was non-standard. If that's not available on the Pi. it makes things a little hard. USB may be the only reasonable way.

-- Pete --

Well, I did some digging, and it seems to be perfectly possible to set the Pi to 31.25kbps [sorry for the typo above.] See for example:

Maybe I'd better dig out my old Amiga MIDI box and see if I can adapt it!

-- Pete --

it will probably be using either a 1488/1489 chip pair or a MAX232 to perform the necessary rs232 to TTL level shifting removing these chips (& linking the input to output pins) should be all that is needed.

--
	[I plan] to see, hear, touch, and destroy everything in my path, 
including beets, rutabagas, and most random vegetables, but excluding  
yams, 
as I am absolutely terrified of yams... 
	Actually, I think my fear of yams began in my early youth, when  
many 
of my young comrades pelted me with same for singing songs of far-off  
lands 
and deep blue seas in a language closely resembling that of the common  
sow. 
My psychosis was further impressed into my soul as I reached adolescence, 
when, while skipping through a field of yams, light-heartedly tossing  
flowers 
into the stratosphere, a great yam-picking machine tore through the  
fields, 
pursuing me to the edge of the great plantation, where I escaped by diving 
into a great ditch filled with a mixture of water and pig manure, which  
may 
explain my tendency to scream, "Here come the Martians!  Hide the eggs!"  
every 
time I have pork.  But I digress.  The fact remains that I cannot  
rationally 
deal with yams, and pigs are terrible conversationalists.

...chip?... necessary?...rs232 to TTL?... Ha! Not on my workbench! (:-)(:-) Had a 6N138 optoisolator and a couple of 2N3708 transistors. Worked perfectly.

Remember that MIDI itself is a 5mA current loop. It doesn't really care about voltages (as long as you're careful not to apply them in a wrong place!). And the Amiga RS232 UART seemed quite happy to run with +5..0V rather than the specified ~+/-5V or so. So with suitable dropping resistors I could run everything from the +12 supplied by the RS232 connector.

I pulled the schematic from my files, and it looks as if it should just need a new set of resistors to work from the 3 and 5V supplies in the Pi.

-- Pete --

Uhh. Nope. I forgot that RS232 levels are sort of the inverse of TTL. A positive voltage is "zero". I can just take the inverter out of the MIDI IN side, but the output will need an extra inverter (or a non- inverting amp) to get things right.

-- Pete --

Same here with a basic USB-MIDI interface.

The Scarlett 2i4, both its MIDI interface and its (very nice) audio interface, is plug-and-play with Debian. I haven't tried it with a Pi but I'd be surprised if it didn't work (though the Pi would probably struggle with duplex audio).

RU coming back to uk.radio.amateur to help raise the tone?

If you want to raise the tone of uk.radio.amateur why don't you stop posting there ?

Funny you should say that. A few years ago the Yamaha and Edirol USB-MIDI interfaces worked without a hitch on Linux, but the M-Audio ones needed firmware downloaded to them to work. And, at the time, getting one's hands on the firmware and convincing Linux to download the firmware to the device when you plugged it in was more trouble than it is worth.

I've also bought some dirt-cheap interfaces from places like

Happily, all of the ones I bought seem to work fine.

Cheers.

Jim

Yeah. Earlier M-Audio ("MidiMan") stuff was definitely *non*-compliant! Yamaha probably worked because Clemens Ladisch wrote the drivers to suit. A few years back I complained on comp.music.midi about Yamaha being non-standard, and got an extensive reply back from Clemens, detailing all the idiosyncracies of the various manufacturers. He did say, though, that "Yamaha devices are _easy_". Apparently just the descriptors are non standard. Edirol was Roland -- who *wrote* the standard -- so they ought to work!

-- Pete --

On 07/13/16 11:56, J.B. Wood so wittily quipped:

I investigated this a while back with Fluidsynth and a USB interface, but (unfortunately) Fluidsynth requires too many floating point operations and chokes in the performance (it won't even do simple MIDI files without effects, for example). Maybe the latest/fastest RPi will work? I only have a model 1 'B' and a model 2 to experiment with.

Hello, and when you refer to Fluidsynth are you talking about something other than a soundfont? What I was talking about in my OP was a standalone Raspberry Pi based simple MIDI sequencer (recorder/player) where the MIDI stream is being rendered by a digital piano not a soundfont+soundcard in a computer. Timidity++ is a nice MIDI file player (no record capability) but AFAIK it interfaces directly with a soundfont and cannot output a MIDI stream to the input port of, say, a USB-to-MIDI interface (e.g. an M-Audio MIDISPORT). My interest here is solo piano and the best IMO "one program that does it all" is the PC-based freeware "MidiPiano" that can construct and play MIDI file playlists, display a piano keyboard with the notes being played and can redirect its MIDI output to the port of a MIDI interface as well as use an internal soundfont. It can also accept input from a MIDI interface. A decent digital audio workstation (DAW) package can do all these things but goes well beyond just the record/play real time capabilities I'm after. Sincerely,

--
J. B. Wood	            e-mail: arl_123234@hotmail.com

oh, ok. you want a direct MIDI player from MIDI file to MIDI output port, and MIDI recorder to a MIDI file then...

saw THIS list, might help:

this one looks promising if you want a GUI: