winmidi.md

The winmidi backend

This backend provides read-write access to the MIDI protocol via the Windows Multimedia API.

It is only available when building for Windows. Care has been taken to keep the configuration syntax similar to the midi backend, but due to differences in the internal programming interfaces, some deviations may still be present.

Global configuration

Option	Example value	Default value	Description
list	on	off	List available input/output devices on startup
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	2	none	MIDI device to connect for input
write	DeviceName	none	MIDI device to connect for output

Input/output device names may either be prefixes of MIDI device names or numeric indices corresponding to the listing shown at startup when using the global list option.

Channel specification

The winmidi backend supports mapping different MIDI events as 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

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.

As this is a Windows-only backend, testing may not be as frequent or thorough as for the Linux / multiplatform backends.