Rebol and MIDI for synth control

[BitNutter]

It seems Rebol would make an ideal tool for custom MIDI control by allowing users to quickly make on-screen interfaces with which to control external synthesizers. MIDI is afterall just a serial protocol.

But tell me please... How, exactly, would I address the MIDI port and would the method vary depending on the platform?

Thanks , BitNutter

[rebolek]

Hi BitNutter,

there's no standard way for MIDI in REBOL. You can use serial port with REBL but first you need to set proper speed and that's not possible from REBOL AFAIK.

I think the best way is to find some standard MIDI library and write REBOL interface to it. Unfortunately, this is limited only to licenced REBOL version. Hopefully library interface will be free in R3.

[Gabriele]

Actually, you can set the speed etc. via REBOL. So if your midi ports are accessible as standard serial ports (i.e. COM1 on Windows, etc) you should be able to work with them via serial:// . You'd need to implement the MIDI protocol yourself though, so it may still be easier to use an existing library as Rebolek suggests.

[Carl]

I think MIDI in REBOL would be very cool... and powerful too.  You should be able to do it today, as Gabriele mentioned.  R3 will also be able to support it better, but there's no need to wait for that to get started...

PS: I'm not an expert an MIDI, although I did some work with it when it first got started back in the early Amiga days (the MIDI creators visited us a lot to get the Amiga team more interested in supporting MIDI.. I thought it was so cool, I only wish we had done a better job with MIDI support on the Amiga).

[rebolek]

I was thinking little bit deeper about it. Most of today's MIDI interfaces are connected to gameport or to USB. I haven't seen MIDI interface on serial port from my Amiga times. And I'm not sure if it's possible to access those ports from REBOL.

So I think it probably should be better to make some library interface. I'm thinking about PortAudio and PortMidi which are multiplatform (Win, Lin, Mac) libraries with non-restrictive licences.

[BitNutter]

Rebolek,
You are right, most MIDI interfaces are USB these days so I guess I would have to buy a version of Rebol  before I can experiment with this.

Carl,
You must have done something right with the Amiga MIDI implementation. I enjoyed using Bars and Pipes and used it to produce music for TV by locking an external VTR to the Amiga with MIDI Timecode. It was a very productive setup.

Thanks all.

[Anton]

My advice would be to look for a program which connects MIDI applications to ethernet. Then rebol just needs to connect to a port.
So the rebol side should then be pretty OS independent. Of course, you need to find that MIDI <-> ethernet program, which will probably be OS dependant.