Java + Midi

BizzyC

Hey,

thinking of final year project ideas for next year, was wondering if anyone knew of some good sites, or books, for showing how to read, and record midi inputs from a musical device in Java.

theexis

What platform are you targetting?

BizzyC

Probably windows, don't have any definite plans done for it though, just looking into it at the moment.
I was thinking of recording the midi inputs of electronic drums. All i'd need from the input is the signal value indicating what drum was hit, and the time on input.

Hobbes

Quick look at google.

http://nosuch.com/nosuchmidi/
http://www.mcnabb.com/software/fantasia/
http://www.softsynth.com/links/java_music.html

HaVoC

java sound api that link is to a chapter on sound in java game coding but he covers a lot of the sound api + midi. If your developing using java 1.5 i think you'll have to change his code a bit to get it working, think you have to explicitly close sound channels.

theexis

How about extending your project to be a full "trigger to MIDI" implementation? i.e. some software that takes a non MIDI input (maybe a feed into the sound card audio port), figures out how "hard" the trigger was, then converts that to MIDI to feed into a sequencer?

BizzyC

What do you mean by hard?

theexis

I.e how hard someone hit the drum or whatever is acting as the trigger, so basically supporting velocity sensitivity rather than just a basic trigger "yes/no".

rsynnott

Ooh, Java Sound, lovely

BizzyC

theexis wrote:

I.e how hard someone hit the drum or whatever is acting as the trigger, so basically supporting velocity sensitivity rather than just a basic trigger "yes/no".

Ah, well this is supported by the newer kits by Yamaha and Roland quite well, so I assume that the midi signal from the drums also contains data on this, so the audio output sounds correct.
I'm not sure exactly how it's done, but they must give some sort of additional data apart from a trigger to support this.

theexis

Right, but you're talking about the MIDI events coming from the drum module, so these are regular note-on/note-off with velocity.

Since you're looking for a final year project I was thinking you might consider going back one step further and see how you'd actually turn a physical "hit" into an electrical signal, then software to convert that to a MIDI event (i.e. the Trigger to MIDI part) then drive a virtual drum kit via VSTi/DXi or Rewire.

BizzyC

You mean creating the midi output myself, without the drum module?
Interesting idea.
I was thinking more along the lines of recording a person's playing, and generating the sheet music. There'd be a lot of work invloved with getting the correct notation, time patterns etc.

theexis

Yes, thats kind of what I was suggesting, but its your project obviously ;o). PM me if you decide to go this route and need pointers.