midimon

About

midimon is a simple cross-platform command line utility to show incoming messages from attached MIDI devices.

It is written in Rust and uses the midir crate for the low-level parts.

Requirements

Build

• Rust toolchain

Use cargo build to compile or cargo run to compile and run.

Tested target platforms

• Linux Mint 21.3
• macOS 10.13 (High Sierra)
• Windows 10

Other OS versions will most likely work, but were not tested explicitly.

Basic usage

To monitor all messages from any input port, run the command without any options.

./midimon

Use Ctrl-C to stop.

Getting help

The h or --help flag will give you an overview about all available options.

./midimon --help

Options

List available input ports

This subcommand shows a list of all available input ports and their numerical ids. The ids are used as abbreviation in the messages list and for the port filter option.

./midimon list

Monitor a single port

The option -p or --port restricts monitoring to a single input port.

Example:

./midimon -p 3

This will show messages from port id 3 only. To find out which physical port refers to each numerical id, use the list subcommand.

Ignoring messages

Use the option -i or --ignore to suppress certain message types.

Possible types:

note        Note Off, Note On
polyat      Polyphonic Key Pressure
cc          Control Change
pc          Program Change
at          Channel Pressure (Aftertouch)
pb          Pitch Bend
sysex       System Exclusive
clock       Timing Clock
sensing     Active Sensing
realtime    All realtime messages (Clock, Start, Stop, Continue, Active Sensing, Reset)
transport   Start, Stop and Continue messages
system      All system messages

Example:

./midimon -i clock sensing

This will ignore incoming clock and active sensing messages.

Channel filter

Use the option -c or --channel to display only messages from a single channel.

Example:

./midimon -c 10

This will only show messages from MIDI channel 10.

Note: System messages are also displayed when using the channel filter. If this is not desired, use the ignore option in addition.

Suppressing informational output

The -q or --quiet option suppresses any informational output like the used ports info. The main use case for this option is when capturing data by redirecting the output to a file.

Display formats

The default display format is intended to be informational and therefore shows an interpreted view of the incoming data.

Use the option -f or --format to select an alternate display format.

Example:

./midimon -f raw

Shows the each message in an uninterpreted list-style format.

Example:

./midimon -f min

Monitor messages using a bare minimum display format.

Example:

./midimon -f min-hex

Same as the -f min option, but with hexadecimal output format.

It is recommended to use these options in combination with the -p option to restrict the monitoring to a single port.

Tips

Capturing data into a file

In case you want to capture some output from a device into a file, e.g. a SysEx dump, use some combination of arguments and a shell redirect.

Example:

./midimon -f min-hex -p 1 -q > midi_capture.txt

Note: This will only work with shells like bash that support redirects.