MIDI::Music - Perl interface to /dev/music.
Version 0.01
Description
MIDI::Music is a high-level interface to /dev/music, and
is designed to function on any *NIX system supported by
Open Sound System v.3.8 or higher.
Playback through internal and external MIDI devices is
supported, as is the "recording" of events from an
external device. Additional goals in designing MIDI::Music
were:
1. to provide an API with as few methods necessary to
satisfy 99% of MIDI programmers' purposes.
2. to provide easy integration with Sean M. Burke's
MIDI-Perl suite by means of a common event
specification.
There are, at present, essentially three things you can do
with MIDI::Music:
1. Play a MIDI file.
2. Play a series of events defined in an event structure,
which is a LoL as described in the the MIDI::Event
manpage documentation.
3. Read a series events from an external device. These
events are returned as the same type of event
structure as in [2].
Requirements
1. You must have Open Sound System v.3.8 or greater installed on your
system. For "realtime" support in recording (see MIDI::Music POD),
the commercial version of OSS is, to the author's knowledge,
necessary. OSS is available from the 4Front Technologies website:
http://www.opensound.com/
2. In order to use the playmidifile() method for playing standard MIDI
files, Sean Burke's MIDI-Perl modules must be installed. MIDI-Perl
is available from the CPAN:
http://www.cpan.org/
Download
The latest version may be downloaded from the MIDI::Music homepage:
http://www.pdamusic.com/computer/midi-music.html
Installation
If you have OSSLib installed, edit Makefile.PL so that the variable
"$OSSPATH" points to the appropriate location (if you have the
commercial release of OSS installed, $OSSPATH should point to the
directory in which you installed it).
Then, the usual:
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test (optional)
make install
To Do
* Add methods for obtaining synthesizer information
(number, types of available devices).
* At present, MIDI::Music supports the interface with
only one open device at a time. Future versions will
allow for simultaneous instances of initialized
devices, if possible.
* At present, system-exclusive events (produced by bulk
dumps, etc.) are not included in the event structures
returned by the readevents() manpage. This should be
fixed in the next release.
* Streamline the playmidifile() code for greater
memory-efficiency, if possible.
Author
Seth David Johnson
[email protected]
Copyright
Copyright (c) 2001 Seth David Johnson. All Rights Reserved. This
program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself.
See Also
The Open Sound System homepage (4Front Technologies):
http://www.opensound.com/
The OSS Programming Guide (PDF), describing in some detail
the /dev/music API on which MIDI::Music is based:
http://www.opensound.com/pguide/oss.pdf
Sean M. Burke's MIDI-Perl extensions provide methods for
dealing with MIDI files; you will need to have them
installed if you wish to use the playmidifile() method.
The documentation for the MIDI::Events manpage provides a
description of the "event structures" common to
MIDI::Music and MIDI-Perl.
Alex McLean's experimental the MIDI::Realtime manpage is
an earlier attempt to provide a synthesizer interface to
Perl. MIDI::Realtime takes an entirely different approach
both in terms of interface and in terms of implementation,
and may be better suited than MIDI::Music to specific
purposes.
The aforementioned extensions can be obtained from the
CPAN:
http://www.cpan.org/
