midi.md

The midi backend

The MIDI backend provides read-write access to the MIDI protocol via virtual ports.

Global configuration

Option	Example value	Default value	Description
name	MIDIMonster	none	MIDI client name
detect	on	off	Output channel specifications for any events coming in on configured instances to help with configuration.

Instance configuration

Option	Example value	Default value	Description
read	20:0	none	MIDI device to connect for input
write	DeviceName	none	MIDI device to connect for output

MIDI device names may either be client:port portnames or prefixes of MIDI device names. Run aconnect -i to list input ports and aconnect -o to list output ports.

Each instance also provides a virtual port, so MIDI devices can also be connected with aconnect <sender> <receiver>.

Channel specification

The MIDI backend supports mapping different MIDI events to MIDIMonster channels. The currently supported event types are

• cc - Control Changes
• note - Note On/Off messages
• pressure - Note pressure/aftertouch messages
• aftertouch - Channel-wide aftertouch messages
• pitch - Channel pitchbend messages

A MIDIMonster channel is specified using the syntax channel<channel>.<type><index>. The shorthand ch may be used instead of the word channel (Note that channel here refers to the MIDI channel number).

The pitch and aftertouch events are channel-wide, thus they can be specified as channel<channel>.<type>.

MIDI channels range from 0 to 15. Each MIDI channel consists of 128 notes (numbered 0 through 127), which additionally each have a pressure control, 128 CC's (numbered likewise), a channel pressure control (also called 'channel aftertouch') and a pitch control which may all be mapped to individual MIDIMonster channels.

Example mappings:

midi1.ch0.note9 > midi2.channel1.cc4
midi1.channel15.pressure1 > midi1.channel0.note0
midi1.ch1.aftertouch > midi2.ch2.cc0
midi1.ch0.pitch > midi2.ch1.pitch

Known bugs / problems

To access MIDI data, the user running MIDIMonster needs read & write access to the ALSA sequencer. This can usually be done by adding this user to the audio system group.

Currently, no Note Off messages are sent (instead, Note On messages with a velocity of 0 are generated, which amount to the same thing according to the spec). This may be implemented as a configuration option at a later time.

To see which events your MIDI devices output, ALSA provides the aseqdump utility. You can list all incoming events using aseqdump -p <portname>.