MIDI control

This crate is meant to provide a high level API for dealing with MIDI controllers, mostly decoding MIDI data received and encoding MIDI data sent.

What it solves?

For another project in Rust, a software musical instrument, I needed code to decode the byte buffers coming from the MIDI device, to respond to the events of the MIDI controller I have. I didn't find any crate I liked or that had the feature I wanted. I found midir for the "transport" layer, ie communicating with the device. So I wrote something and it worked.

Later I wanted to play with the controler and found out the proprietary MIDI commands to configure it. On a broader scope I wanted to see how I could approach configuring MIDI controller for use as a musical instrument, something vendor agnostic. So I started write some ugly code and then started this crate with what I had previously written.

This library will take byte buffers and decode them into a structured data. And will turn one of these structured data to a buffer of bytes. It will try to provide also functions to use the vendor MIDI messages.

How do you do use this?

When you received data from the MIDI device in buffer.

let message = MidiMessage::from(buffer);
match command {
    MidiMessage::NoteOn(ch, e) =>
        /* note on  */,
    MidiMessage::NoteOff(ch, e) =>
        /* note off */
}

To send a command of MIDI:

use midi_control;
let message = midi_control::note_on(Channel::Ch1, 60, 127);
let buffer: Vec<u8> = message.into();
/* send the buffer to your MIDI device */

Where to start?

The example arturia-blink.rs will use midir to send commands to blink the pads with cycling colours.

Add to your Cargo.toml the following dependency:

midi-control = "0.1.0"

I recommend reading about MIDI is you have no experience.

More

As of now only MIDI 1.0 is supported. This is the 1983 standard with its improvement. MIDI 2.0 might come but right now is not the priority.

As of today, only one vendor Sys Exclusive messages is supported and is the one for Arturia™ controllers. This is not in anyway endorsed or supported by them, it just happen to be the controller I have: an inexpensive MiniLab MkII.

The crate doesn't provide API to the transport (MIDI driver), but by default will build support for using midir as transport. Disable the transport feature to build it standalone:

cargo build --no-default-features

Example programs require the transport feature.

Developer info

The source code is hosted on gitlab:

https://gitlab.com/hfiguiere/midi-control

Licensing

License: LGPL-3.0-or-later Author: Hubert Figuière hub@figuiere.net