Finally, here’s a MIDI utility that shows you just the information you need about MIDI activity, instead of dumping a massive list of messages on the screen. ShowMIDI is free and open source, with builds for macOS, Windows, and Linux, thanks to developer Geert Bevin.
MIDI utilities are something you need all the time for troubleshooting connections, identifying what CC number a particular knob sends, and so on. But while there are various free and powerful tools out there, they tend to dump a bunch of stuff on the screen. ShowMIDI is much easier to look at – it’s still real-time, but it’s easy to just select ports without diving through confusing dialogs and extra steps, and you see messages organized by channel and message type instead of just one big honking list.
And… that’s it. You can go ahead and download this for free on your OS of choice and that’s it. Download:
https://github.com/gbevin/showmidi
Thanks, Geert! (Not sure how he has any time, while working on app development for Moog and devising 3D-printed Eurorack cases, too! Geert, please slow down as you’re making the rest of us look bad.)
For more background, he’s also made a video explaining how this works and why he developed it: