Pigiron, a MIDI Routing Utility with OSC | Hacker News Reader

Pigiron, a MIDI Routing Utility with OSC

github.com

51 pointsplewto6 comments

For those unfamiliar with the term OSC:

> Open Sound Control (OSC) is a protocol for networking sound synthesizers, computers, and other multimedia devices for purposes such as musical performance or show control.

- Wikipedia

With Pigiron, MIDI processing blocks, called 'Operators', may be freely connected to form a MIDI process graph. The following operator types are available:

ChannelFilter - filter messages by MIDI channel. Distributor - re-transmit message on any number of MIDI channels. MIDIInput - wrapper for MIDI input device. MIDIOutput - wrapper for MIDI output device MIDIPlayer - a MIDI file player. Monitor - display MIDI traffic. Transposer - manipulate MIDI data bytes.

Pigiron has a comprehensive OSC interface as well as an interactive command-line interface. It is terminal based program only implemented in Go. Currently it has only been tested on Ubunto Linux.

Great project! I've been using mididings for similar purposes. Main draw of this for me is customization in go instead of cpp. How would you say it compares otherwise?

http://das.nasophon.de/mididings/

Hi, Thanks for your response. I have to admit I was unaware of mididings even though I did a search for similar projects last year. Somehow mididings did not pop up. Looking at their website it does have a lot of overlap with Pigiron. The Harmonizer and scenes features look nice though I doubt I would use them myself. I like the idea of being able to execute arbitrary shell commands, that opens up a lot of possibilities.

Pigiron is actually an evolution of a previous (unreleased) project I wrote years ago in Java. It had a similar structure of linked nodes, each specialized for a specific task. One of the things it had that Pigiron so far does not, are sysex editors, specifically for the DX7 and Oberheim Matrix synths. At some point I'll probably write a client app for the DX7 and maybe a more general sysex editor. Sadly the Oberheim has died. Another idea I want to investigate is integrating basic synthesis blocks that can be linked directly into the Pigiron tree. I want to keep it relatively simple though.

For those on Windows who would like to have a MIDI routing utility with a GUI, check out Midi Yoke / Midi Ox[1]

It's been reliably working for me since NT 4.0 days.

[1]http://www.midiox.com

First thing I’m wondering is how much garbage collection impacts the sequence timing. Love to see midi tools!

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