Python MIDI in 2008

[Maciej Bliziñski]

For the last couple of days, I've been looking for a Python midi
library. I'm generally interested in sending MIDI events via ALSA. It
seems like everything out there is pretty old; packages are from 2003
or 2005. Some packages don't seem to be really used, for instance
portmidi doesn't even support installing it system-wide; you can
compile it and... no make install for you.

What I've found so far:
- http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonInMusic mostly point to non-
existing or very old software packages
- http://www.mxm.dk/products/public/pythonmidi/ -- no realtime support

Promising packages:
- http://trac2.assembla.com/pkaudio/browser/pyrtmidi -- something
realtime, but I couldn't get the actual Subversion repository address
- http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~harrison/code.html -- seems promising,
but I haven't got it running. You can't (system-wide) install
portmidi, and pyportmidi seems to want portmidi installed.

Is there any other package that allows sending MIDI events in real
time? Did anyone recently got any of the above packages to work?

Maciej

 

[alex23]

Is there any other package that allows sending MIDI events in real
time? Did anyone recently got any of the above packages to work?

There's MidiKinesis (http://www.sci.ccny.cuny.edu/~brinkman/software/
midikinesis/) which allows for midi events to be bound to X-Windows
events. It looks like it achieves this using ctypes to wrap around
the ALSA libs, which may be another approach to consider. The
MidiKineses codebase would be a good place to start if you wanted to
give that a try.

I'm sorry I can't be of much more help but please keep us posted on
what you find!

- alex23

 

[Max M]

Maciej Blizin'ski skrev:

For the last couple of days, I've been looking for a Python midi
library. I'm generally interested in sending MIDI events via ALSA. It
seems like everything out there is pretty old; packages are from 2003
or 2005.

existing or very old software packages
- http://www.mxm.dk/products/public/pythonmidi/ -- no realtime support

This is old in the sense that it has been a while since I wrote it. But
it is virtually bug free, so nothing much is happening.

The midi standard does not change so there is no real reason to
change/upgrade it.

It is currently being used by the very popular "frets on fire"

http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/documentation/source/


It does not have real time support even though I did write it with that
support in mind. I just never got around to write it as I did not need
it myself.


I also developed it on Windows and I found it to be a bore to get real
time midi working.

It would probably be easier now that I am on Linux.


Well I just thought I would mention that it is not dead. Merely middle aged.


--

hilsen/regards Max M, Denmark

http://www.mxm.dk/
IT's Mad Science

 

[Brett g Porter]

For the last couple of days, I've been looking for a Python midi
library. I'm generally interested in sending MIDI events via ALSA. It
seems like everything out there is pretty old; packages are from 2003
or 2005. Some packages don't seem to be really used, for instance
portmidi doesn't even support installing it system-wide; you can
compile it and... no make install for you.

I haven't used the PortMidi bindings that are in the Cheeseshop at
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyPortMidi/0.0.3

but I've used PortMidi extensively from C++ code and have had excellent
results with it.

 

[Aahz]

Well I just thought I would mention that it is not dead. Merely middle aged.

"'E's just resting!"

 

[Asun Friere]

This is old in the sense that it has been a while since I wrote it. But
it is virtually bug free, so nothing much is happening.

The midi standard does not change so there is no real reason to
change/upgrade it.

Maybe you should add a method somehwere that does nothing much,
increment the version number and give it a 2008 date?

 

[Paul Boddie]

[Python Midi]

It does not have real time support even though I did write it with that
support in mind. I just never got around to write it as I did not need
it myself.

I also developed it on Windows and I found it to be a bore to get real
time midi working.

It would probably be easier now that I am on Linux.

I was previously quite interested in getting MIDI output working for a
game I wrote, and I suppose that the Python Midi package would have
been of interest (with pygame probably handling the interface to the
hardware), but given the bizarre kernel module gymnastics required to
support real-time output (and I still don't know if my sound hardware
actually supports MIDI directly or not), I decided in the end to use
timidity to generate normal audio files and to send those through the
sound system instead. Of course, that more or less eliminates any real-
time aspects.

Paul