RMididings

RMididings is a partial clone of mididings in Rust, allowing one to use a syntax not unlike mididings for MIDI event routing and processing. Mididings is a Python-based MIDI router and processor.

It is in somewhat early development, and many things are not available. What is:

• NoteOn, NoteOff, Ctrl and SysEx events.
• Supports the alsa backend, which ties it to Linux.
• A limited set of filters, modifiers and generators.
• A limited set of connections: Chain!, Fork! and Not!.
• Scenes and subscenes, scene switching and running a single patch.
• Pre, post, init, exit and control patches.
• (new) native Osc events, which can be handled in a patch.

Some missing things can be implemented, but there are some limitations using Rust, e.g. syntax can differ, and not all variations of argument types to filters etc. are supported. Sometimes the syntax is a bit messy (e.g. with Process). We'll see what can be improved.

Running

You'll need Rust 1.52.0+ with Cargo. The easiest option to get a recent enough Rust is using Rustup.

You also need the ALSA headers. On Debian you would need to run apt-get install libasound2-dev, on Fedora dnf install alsa-lib-devel.

Rmididings is a crate, which means that you write your own program that uses it. Let's start with a simple example. Create a project directory, and a subdirectory src, where you put the following file as main.rs:

// src/main.rs
#[macro_use]
extern crate rmididings;
use rmididings::*;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
  let mut md = RMididings::new()?;

  md.config(ConfigArguments {
    in_ports:  &[["input",  "Virtual Keyboard:Virtual Keyboard"]],
    out_ports: &[["output", "midisnoop:MIDI Input"]],
    ..ConfigArguments::default()
  })?;

  md.run(RunArguments {
    patch: &Pass(),
    ..RunArguments::default()
  })?;

  Ok(())
}

To get this running, you'll also need a Cargo.toml in the project directory:

[package]
name = "myproject"
version = "0.0.1"

[dependencies]
rmididings = "^0.2.1"

Then, from within the project directory, run cargo run, and you're set. This sample program passes all events from the input to the output port. When before running you have vkeybd and midisnoop running (same package names in Debian/Ubuntu), they will be connected automatically. Terminate the program with Ctrl-C

Building a patch

The patch above merely passes all events with Pass(). It becomes more interesting when we start building a chain of filters. Instead of &Pass(), we could use the following:

&Chain!(
  ChannelFilter(1),
  Fork!(
    Pass(),
    Chain!(Transpose(4), VelocityMultiply(0.8)),
    Chain!(Transpose(7), VelocityMultiply(0.5))
  ),
  Channel(2)
)

This chain ignores any other channel than 1 and returns a major chord for the note, with higher notes slightly attenuated. Finally all notes are sent out at channel 2.

Scenes

Instead of a patch, one can pass scenes to the run function:

md.run(RunArguments {
    scenes: &[
        // Scene 1
        &Scene {
            name: "Run",
            patch: &Pass(),
            ..Scene::default()
        },
        // Scene 2
        &Scene {
            name: "Pause",
            patch: &Discard(),
            ..Scene::default()
        }
    ],
    control: &Fork!(
      Chain!(TypeFilter!(Note), KeyFilter(62), SceneSwitch(2)),
      Chain!(TypeFilter!(Note), KeyFilter(60), SceneSwitch(1))
    ),
    ..RunArguments::default()
})?;

Here there are two scenes, one that passes all events and one that discards them. The control patch is always run, here the note central C and the following D are used to switch between the scenes.

Plans

See issues.

License

GPL-3.0 or later or later.