Have you ever seen some person playing a guitar with a looper pedal on the street? That's what this program is for, but with two fundamental differences:
- Although it can be used with any source of audio, this is intended for using a synthesizer.
- It has midi integrated, as well as audio, so it can be used as both an audio looper and a midi looper, all at once. You can "bounce" your midi tracks as audio recording a new track as audio.
So, we could say this software is a WIP CLI midi and audio looper. You can record and play midi and audio, all in sync, so with a hardware synthesizer and a line input in your audio interface you are able to record many tracks which will loop. It is possible, as well, to mute/deactivate tracks and activate them again without stopping. They will activate or deactivate when the loop ends, not immediately.
This could be considered a beta. It works, but some bugs are expected. Don't use it live, as it could fail, and I would be really sad if someone faced humilliation because of my mistakes.
- Record midi loops from an external synthesizer or midi controller.
- Record midi loops with different lengths in a 4/4 rythm.
- Easily bounce those midi loops to audio (pressing a button), as long as the input audio in your computer is set to the audio output of your synthesizer.
- Change the config file (omband.conf) in order to adapt omband to your needs:
- Choose bpm.
- Choose PPQN (called "ticks per beat" in omband).
- Choose any midi file to load.
- Choose your input and output ports of your synthesizer (in mine, it's the same port, for some reason).
THIS HAS BEEN TESTED ON LINUX ONLY.
- Curses in python crashes when shrinking too much the console window. I'm not sure how to fix it, and if it's possible at all.
- When you quit, the console is messed up and it needs to be closed, I would love to know what is causing it and fix it.
- It needs a midi file in order to load, but I don't want that. It will load any midi file indicated in omband.conf, though. By default, it loads a midi file with a metronome track (easily muted if you don't need it).
- Controls have to improve. They are still hardcoded as well.
- Check why the names of the ports in my synth are the same. I had to choose a few ports of my synth until it worked. Is it a problem with linux or a problem with omband?
- Documentation.
- Refactorization and renaming.
- curses (it should be included in Linux, maybe not in Windows)
- mido
- python-rtmidi
- pyaudio (ATTENTION: pyaudio fails in python 3.10. There's a fork of pyaudio which solves this error (related to PY_SSIZE_T_CLEAN) until pyaudio is updated)
- pygame (I want to get rid of this dependency, though)
If you press "p" on your keyboard, it will start playing or stop playing.
If you press "a" on your keyboard, it will arm a new track to record audio. If it's stopped, it will start recording as soon as you press "p" to play. If it's playing, it will start recording as soon as a new bar is started.
If you press "r" on your keyboard, it will arm a new track to record midi. If it's stopped, it will start recording as soon as you press "p" to play. If it's playing, it will start recording as soon as a new bar is started.
You can delete the last audio track pressing "d". It will not delete midi tracks, though.
If you press the same number as the index of the midi track, it will start/stop playing as soon as that particular loop ends. For example, if you want to deactivate midi track number 3, you just press "3" on your keyboard.
Your audio tracks will be overwritten by a new program, but you could save new versions of your midi tracks when pressing "g" at any moment. It will not have any feedback, but a directory will be created alongside the program with a new midi file whose name will be the current date and time. It will not overwrite previous versions. The midi file will be a type 1 midi file. That means "multitrack" midi file, so you could open it with other programs, like Sequencer64, and it will work.
Press "q" and omband will stop and you will be in a messed up console. At least the program would have finished. If someone knows how to fix this bug, please, be kind to tell me how.
omband, midi and audio looper Copyright (C) 2021, 2022 Marcos Redwood (marcos.rc91 at gmail.com)
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.