Midge, midi sequencing from the comfort of your text editor.

Midge, for midi generator, is a text to midi translator. It creates type 1 (ie multitrack) midi files from text descriptions of music.

The source language used is documented in the man page, and demonstrated in the source files in the examples directory.

Midge is free software and you are welcome to redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence.

Midge generates MIDI files from text input. Most General MIDI features are supported, and there are some basic methods of randomly generating sequences. Also included is a decompiler and an emacs mode.

Requirements.

Midge has been tested with Perl 5.8.0 on GNU/Linux, and ActiveState Perl 5.8.0 on Windows XP, and should work on any system with a basic installation of Perl 5.005 or higher. The last version tested with Perl 5.005 was version 0.2.27 but the latest version should still work.

The included midi2mg script additionally requires the MIDI modules by Sean M. Burke, which are available from CPAN.

Current features.

* Sections of music can be predefined and reused multiple times, transposing if required.
* Allows nested repeats.
* Supports setting of reverb and chorus.
* Supports setting of note on/note off velocity.
* Supports setting of individual track volume.
* Supports setting of track/instrument names.
* Supports setting of key signature.
* Supports tuplets, which may be nested.
* Supports pitch bending and setting of pitch wheel range.
* Tempo and time signature can be changed within a track.
* Can choose a note or riff randomly from a list of notes and/or predefined riffs.
* Can choose multiple notes randomly from a list of (different length) notes or riffs to produce a riff of specified length.
* Can generate a sequence of notes from a user defined `chain' structure where for each note there is a weighted list of notes which may follow it.
* Can offset notes from the beat by either a specified or randomly chosen amount.
* Separate note on and note off events can be used to play simultaneous notes.
* Supports text marker events.
* Supports panning events.
* Supports bank changes.
* Supports rpn and nrpn controllers.
* Ranges (eg `8-64') can be used when setting the volume, pan, reverb, chorus, attack and decay, which causes a random value within the range to be used.
* An emacs mode with syntax highlighting for editing and compiling midge files and playing the resulting midi files (if you have a command line midi player). See README.elisp

Changes in this release.

* New head section keyword $bar_strict to check consistency of bars, giving an error or warning unless each track has the same number of bars and numbered bars appear at the same time in each track. (Patch contributed by Gary Wong).
* Fix for timing in chords.

Examples.

A simple example: source code and resulting midi file
example of random feature: source code and a resulting midi file

There are more examples included in the archive.

Installation.

To install, just unpack the archive and run:

* perl configure.pl

to configure the install path and the path to your perl executable, and then:

* make

to install the program and man page.

Download.