Tclmidi is language designed for creating and editing standard MIDI files. With the proper device interface it will also play and record MIDI files. Since tclmidi is a language supporting function calls, recursion and conditionals, you can use these features for editing, sequencing and writing complex scripts. The brave might even want to try their hand at algorithmic composition.
The basis of tclmidi is John Ousterhout's popular Tcl language. Tclmidi adds a few new commands specific to manipulating MIDI files, and playing/recording them. You'll need to have Tcl 7.5 installed on your system to build tclmidi. I no longer support earlier versions.
I've tried to be POSIX compliant while writing tclmidi. It has been built on numerous machines and should compile on any Unix like machine with a C++ compiler. It now also runs under Windows.
Tclmidi comes with a device driver to interface with a few types of MIDI cards and also support for using your serial port as a MIDI interface. Supported cards include MPU401, MQX32, Gravis UltraSound and SoundBlaster (though both the GUS and SB support is limited to the MIDI ports, the driver does not yet use these board to generate their own sounds - the SB hasn't been tested much either). There is some proto code to use the GUS to generate its own sound, but it doesn't work yet. Look for it in future releases. Tclmidi will also support some features of the different cards, including the SMPTE support found on the MQX32.
The driver tries to be OS independent too. 90% of the driver is completely portable, only the remaining 10% needs to be rewritten to support a new UNIX variant. This distribution comes with support for BSD/OS, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Unixware (though the Unixware driver isn't completely tested). These five cover a wide range of systems and one should make a good basis for a port to a new system.
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What's New in Tclmidi-3.1.0
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Tclmidi is now a loadable module that works in conjunction with Tcl-7.5. There are no longer a tclmidi or tkmidi executables. Instead you use the standard tclsh or wish interpreters and then load the tclmidi commands using the "package require tclmidi" command.
Tclmidi now builds using the "configure" script. You should no longer need to edit a Makefile. Just "./configure; make" to build the package.
Installation has gotten a bit trickier. This is because of TCL's method of locating loadable libraries and building the pkgIndex.tcl file, not because of something found in tclmidi itself. By default, tclmidi installs the library in /usr/local/lib/tclmidi and builds a pkgIndex.tcl in that directory. In order for tclsh or wish to find these files you must add /usr/local/lib/tclmidi to your TCLLIBPATH environment variable or add "lappend auto_path /usr/local/lib/tclmidi" to the beginning of any script that uses tclmidi.
The tclmidi driver now has some proto-code for using a Gravis Ultra Sound (both old and new PnP) to synthesize sound directly. Unfortunately, this code doesn't work yet. This will be my major goal for the next release (as well as supporting other sound cards).
Windows users will be pleased to learn that tclmidi will run under Windows. I'm very unfamiliar with the Windows 95 environment and the Visual C++ compiler and thus don't have a Makefile to build the .dll from source (VC++ uses "projects" and I can't figure out how to create a Makefile from a project"). However, rest assured that I do build the .dll from the exact same source with no modifications. I also pre-compile the tclmidi.dll and make it available for anonymous ftp. If there are any Windows wizards out there that would like to help me create a Makefile and/or write a good installation script, please let me know.
Added a new command, midigrep. It allows you to search tracks looking for events using pattern matching. Much faster than doing the same thing with tcl code.
And of course, there have been a few bug fixes.
You need Tcl 7.5 installed. You don't need the source though, as all the information tclmidi needs can be found in the installed header files.
You also need a C++ compiler. The GNU compiler g++ is free and works.
./configure make make install
Is back! As I mentioned above, I don't have a Makefile to build it from the source (VC++ uses "projects"), but it does build from the unmodified sources. I also make a pre-compiled version of tclmidi.dll available so you don't have to compile it yourself.
You need tcl-7.5 installed on your system. You can get pre-built versions of tcl and tk via anonymous ftp from ftp.smli.com.
To install tclmidi, you need to put the tclmidi.dll file in some directory that tclsh or wish will search and then build a pkgIndex.tcl that references the dll. I'm going to try to write a tcl script that will do the installation automatically. For now I'll install tclmidi.dll in the tcl lib directory, but eventually I'd like to put it in a different directory and just have people set their TCLLIBPATH environment variable. Does anyone out there know how to set an environment variable under Windows/Windows 95/Windows NT? If so, please let me know.
Scripts. I've included four, mplay, mrec, minfo and midtocl. If you write some good ones, send them to me and I'll include them. Lucho Georgiev has written a few, which can be found in the contrib directory (though by now they are out of date and I haven't had a chance to update them). I'm hoping others will contribute too.
Xdrum support. Xdrum won't work with this version of tclmidi. I'll eventually redo xdrum to work with tclmidi, but it might be a while. I also want to write a X based score editor based on this stuff. That will probably take *quite* a while.
I've set up a mailing list for tclmidi discussion. To subscribe, send mail to tclmidi-request@boogie.com and include the phrase "subscribe" in the body of the message. The subject line is ignored, so don't put the phrase there. To send mail to the list, email tclmidi@boogie.com.
Thanks goes to all those who have helped me get this thing working. Extra special thanks goes to the following for putting up with a lot of system crashes and debugging to make the driver ports usable. Thank them for getting the driver to work. Blame me for any bugs you find.
Greg Wolodkin wolodkin@aem.umn.edu SMPTE, Linux
Ralf Jaegar raja@rajas.rhein-main.de Linux
Andreas Gustafsson gson@niksula.hut.fi NetBSD
Luchezar Georgiev lucho@tu-varna.bg Linux
Alberto Vignani alberto.vignani@pmn.it Linux
Allaoua Bouabdallah alawa@tao.aiuniv-paris8.fr UnixWare
John Utz spaz@u.washington.edu FreeBSD
Dejan Vucinic dejan@mit.edu Serial interface
Brian Eriks beriks@mercury.jorsm.com Windows
And of course I'd like to thank everyone who has been using tclmidi, finding bugs and helping me test.
mike durian@boogie.com
Like Tclmidi, Tkseq supports the MPU-401 and other midi interfaces, and can also handle SMPTE sync for users with supported Music Quest cards. In addition, Tkseq can work with Hannu Savolainen's sound driver (formerly Voxware) to play notes using the Gravis Ultrasound's internal voices. Even scarier, it can work with MusicTeX to score simple pieces (be warned that MIDI2TeX isn't perfect, though..)
Tkseq can read and write standard MIDI files. A partial list of features includes quantization, randomization, transposition, timing adjustment, volume control, track mute/solo, track merge/copy/erase, piano roll view, single-event view/edit, limited cut and paste, channel remapping, play and record, SMPTE sync, metronome generation, patch management (for GUS users), and limited scoring capabilities via LaTeX.
Tkseq is free software, released under the GPL. Here's a screen dump to give you an idea of how things look.
Special thanks to Mike not only for putting tclmidi together in the first place, but also for being willing and able to update and modify tclmidi whenever new ideas pop up.
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