Re: Playing MIDI Files

On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 5:59 AM, David Seager <david@seager.info> 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.
>
> 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.
>

Hope this helps ... I play midi files all the time using my little
program xpmidi. Really, it's just a little selector which calls
aplaymidi to play the file. But, the trick I use is that if the play
is interrupted it sends a customized, created on the fly file to the
play a "all notes off" to each channel followed by a midi reset. The
program, ugly as it is, is on my web site:

  http://mellowood.ca/xpmidi/index.html




-- 
**** Listen to my CD at http://www.mellowood.ca/music/cedars ****
Bob van der Poel ** Wynndel, British Columbia, CANADA **
EMAIL: bob@mellowood.ca
WWW:   http://www.mellowood.ca