Re: Playing MIDI Files

On Mon, Nov 05, 2012 at 12:59:51PM +0000, David Seager wrote:
> I am writing a simple MIDI file player to be used in a small street
> organ.  I intend to use it to play tunes from playlists with a few
> simple controls to start, stop, skip to next file etc.  It is
> intended to run on the new Raspberry Pi under Debian Linux.  I have
> looked at the various MIDI players that are available and Midish
> seems to offer most of what I need but I have found a couple of
> problems that I hope some more experienced Midish users can help me
> to overcome.
> 
> I have been experimenting with Midish in "verbose" as this will
> allow me to stop playing with the "s" command rather than just
> killing the process.  Also, I would like to be able to use the
> measure numbers returned by Midish to support a pause and resume
> facility.
 
Fwiw, the "i" command can be used to to pause playback.

> Problem 1:
> When I stop playing a file, any notes that are on at that tine will
> remain on.  I would prefer it to send an "all notes off" MIDI
> instruction to the instrument.  I suspect the reason that this is
> not done is that it could interrupt input from other sources but
> would be interested in your comments.

Hmm.. notes are supposed to stop; normally midish keeps track of
all notes playing and when playback is stopped, it sends the
appropriate note-off events (similarly it resets certain
controllers, the pitch bender and alike). Do hints on how to
reproduce the problem?

> Problem 2:
> When Midisih is running in verbose mode there is no indication when
> a file is finished which I need to start playing the next one.  The
> measure  and beat numbers just continue running indefinitely.  I
> considered using the "mend" command to find the last measure number
> used but this does not seem to work.  If I send "mend" to Midish it
> seems to ignore it.  Any ideas?

this is supposed to work on the cvs version. On older releases, you
have to use "print [mend]" (means print the result of "mend").

-- Alexandre