Geert Bevin’s awesome, attractive, totally free, and open-source ShowMIDI has reached the 1.0 milestone, with new features and an updated video tutorial to match. If you’re looking to monitor MIDI on Mac, Windows, Linux, or iOS, your ship came in.
V1.0 has added a lot – and if you didn’t keep up to date, ShowMIDI has gotten steady updates to functionality and looks. Most significantly, you now can run on iOS via the App Store – still for free. (For whatever reason, it’s not on the Mac App Store; you should still use GitHub releases for that.) There’s also 14-bit MIDI support for higher-resolution data, and tempo displayed as bpm.
Full feature log for this one:
- Improved channel order algorithm, now showing a channel at the top when it appears, keeping its order until it disappears.
- Added support for displaying MIDI data as scrolling graphs with compact, medium and large height settings.
- Added support for Hi-Res 14-bit MIDI Control Change messages.
- Added support for MIDI clock displayed as BPM.
- Added support for MIDI clock start, continue and stop.
- Added ability to hide or show all devices by holding the
alt/optionkey while toggle a device’s visibility in the sidebar.- Added a reset button to clear all MIDI data.
- Added ‘never’ as a timeout delay option.
- Added keyboard shortcuts for toggling visualization style and MIDI data reset.
- Added tooltips to sidebar buttons.
- Various stability improvements.
- Updated macOS App Icon to be the same size as other icons.
- Updated CLAP JUCE extension.
- Upgraded JUCE to 7.0.12.
- iOS release available for free on App Store
https://github.com/gbevin/ShowMIDI/releases
There’s also a tutorial video:
Check the project site for all the resources:
https://github.com/gbevin/ShowMIDI
I’m curious what folks use for OSC (OpenSoundControl), which is a little trickier to monitor. Here’s one tool built in Processing, which has the advantage of being easy to modify if you’re familiar with that environment.
But the one tool I use alongside ShowMIDI is unquestionably hexler’s Protokol. And actually I hope ShowMIDI doesn’t try to match this feature-for-feature. ShowMIDI is perfect for just visualizing MIDI all at once; Protokol is a better general-purpose monitoring tool that also covers OSC, ArtNet (soon), game pads, and whatnot. Via hexkler’s Threads account, that one seems well on its way to a big release soon, and you can already test it. Previously:
Now that you’ve read this far, you should also check out Geert’s own project site, which now has a bunch of fun stuff for link diggers. That includes his excellent command-line utilities, SendMIDI and ReceiveMIDI. SendMIDI nicely complements ShowMIDI because you can quickly send commands from the command line while still monitoring with ShowMIDI’s superior visualization.
The last big update: