Don’t let anyone outgeek you. Fire up that command prompt and get your MIDI chores done fast, without all that mucking about with your mouse. (You know, it is often slower to mouse around, you’ve got to admit.)
Div’s MIDI Utilities for Windows (via)
Div’s MIDI Utilities for UNIX (definitely runs on Linux as it was developed there, not sure about Mac)
Here’s what you can do:
- List MIDI in and out ports
- Merge MIDI and route like a thru
- Monitor MIDI data
- Send MIDI messages
- Use NetMIDI to route MIDI over a network
- Convert keystrokes to MIDI
- Record MIDI into a file
- Run scripts and MIDI messages on pedal inputs
. . . and lots of other cool stuff. Looks like a must have for day-to-day MIDI, troubleshooting, and working with MIDI sensors and custom hardware.
The Windows version is the most well-developed, with nifty features like a percussion sampler and interactive tempo mapper. Also good news: the whole collection is totally open source, so it’s an invitation to you programmer types to learn more about coding for MIDI and come up with other neat ideas.
Now, the next challenge is getting this to work on Mac; I think it should via Core Audio on OpenSound but I’ve found X11 to be a little finicky to deal with. If you get it working and have install tips on Mac or Linux, let us know.
I can’t believe I wasn’t using this already, particularly on Windows. Anyone know of other useful command line MIDI utilities?