Quick! Send a MIDI control change message! Or some obscure parameter!
Well, sometimes typing something is the easiest way to do things. And that’s why Geert Bevin’s new, free and open source tool SendMIDI is invaluable. Sorry to nerd out completely here, but I suspect this is going to be way more relevant to my daily life than anything coming out of NAMM this week.
In this case, whether you know much about how to use a command line or not, there’s almost certainly no faster way of performing basic MIDI tasks. Anyone working with hardware is certain to want one. (Someone I suspect will make their own little standalone MIDI tool by connecting a Raspberry Pi to a little keyboard and carry it around like a MIDI terminal.)
The commands are simple and obvious and easy to remember once you try them. Installation is dead-simple. Every OS is supported – build it yourself, install with Homebrew on macOS, or – the easiest method – grab a pre-built binary for Windows, Mac, or Linux.
And now with version 1.0.5, the whole thing is eminently usable and supports more or less the entire MIDI spec, minus MIDI Time Code (which you wouldn’t want to send this way anyway).
So, now troubleshooting, sending obscure parameter changes, and other controls is simpler than ever. It’s a must for hardware lovers.
Developers, that support for all operating systems is also evidence of how easy the brilliant open source C++ JUCE framework makes building. The ProJucer tool does all the magic. “But wait, I thought JUCE was for making ugly non-native GUIs,” I’m sure some people are saying. No, actually, that’s wrong on two counts. One, JUCE doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with GUIs; it’s a full-featured multimedia framework focused on music, and this tool shows your end result might not have a GUI at all. Two, if you’ve seen an ugly UI, that’s the developer’s fault, not JUCE’s – and very often you’ve seen beautiful GUIs built in JUCE, but as a result didn’t know that’s how they were built.
But anyone should grab this, seriously.
https://github.com/gbevin/SendMIDI