2 way midi control.

JDL

I see there are a few posts on Midi, but they seem to have gone MIA in that there is no apparent further activity. I have a situation where I must have a DAW on a computer, essentially playing back a song track and a midi control track. I would like the midi control track to be able to be assigned to openlp, sending commands to openlp. The DAW would already be publishing itself as a midi source and should be selectable. My scenario would entail a timeline in openlp where you could assign exact midi note/change information to be received as the trigger to be at that place in the timeline. An alternative would be certain change data to head up a section, with other commands doing <next> in the sequence. So a person could set up a full presentation with "start" positions and the appropriate midi signal coming in would trigger <next> -OR-, external midi is set up to control everything for a completely flexible usage, meaning each section would have its own midi note or command that would trigger it to display, with the assigned <next> command still working. At the same time, some folks would like for openlp to issue midi commands, publishing itself as a midi source in the OS. As you step through the presentation, programmed midi commands would be issued. Additional steps should be provided and labeled as a Midi command with an end user label on it for easy identification. I am hoping this is not overly complicated to think through and implement. I could see people using a stage midi controller to essentially control openlp and a DAW from a stage, or a DAW to control openlp all within the same computer, and within reason, this software controlling other midi devices with basic commands. This could also be part of other possible combinations as might be needed by a user in any given situation, like lighting control, or other midi device control.

JDL

From my post above, it seems that there would be two types of midi field then in the "step" timeline. One type for publishing midi, ie, sending midi out, and another for receiving midi from the selected midi input. I guess these could be called midi "tags". The send tags should exist just like other presentation elements to be stepped through with the appropriate midi command being sent when that element is called upon. The receive tags, existing like other presentation elements, would be the means to "position the active pointer in the timeline exactly here". Both types of tags should have a "stop/pause here" or "process and go to next" flag, to determine if the item should be processed and go to the next item immediately, or be processed and then stop/wait right there. There would need to be a way to assign midi send and receive control commands to key items like <next>, <previous>, <top>, <bottom>, <play>, <stop>, <restart> as needed (some of these may not have relevance to openlp, but it is the thought of covering basic presentation handling that is the foundation of the thinking here).

JDL

A send tag and a receive tag should likely be present/available in each presentation item object, at the "top" of it, but the capability should still be there of having additional tags in the timeline in order to be able to send multiple midi commands, or to start at any given spot in that sequence an end user may set up. As a timeline object, the tags should probably have the option of keeping prior video output available (a persistance setting somewhere?) or blanking the screen. This essentially would make openlp more fully a step sequencer in midi terms. Much of the principle of step sequencing is already in use in the product.

JDL

I am hoping this might be helpful: http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonInMusic http://www.mxm.dk/products/public/pythonmidi http://sourceforge.net/projects/pymidi/develop http://sourceforge.net/search/?q=Python+MIDI

JDL

I also see that some midi is being considered for version 2. I apologize if I've posted incorrectly in the forums here. In my presentation here I do hope that I've been able to expand constructively upon the usefulness, the potential, and the possibilities of the (future) concept of midi in the product.

raoul

Thanks for the extensive post, and the links to help us get started :-) Unfortuntely we've pretty much hit a sort of feature freeze for version 2.0 right now, we're quite eager to get it out the door after more than 2 years of development. That said, we'll definitely look into MIDI support in version 2.2 (the next release after 2.0)

pmarch

I see that this post is very old, but I thought I would add my $0.02...

I also need MIDI control from a DAW playing multitracks.  A real life example of a reasonable implementation may be seen here:  http://www.renewedvision.com/downloads/pro6userguide.pdf  (doc page 130 - implementation specifics page 132) (This only represents one way communication, but it's still relevant.)

One additional feature that I've never seen referenced in this forum related to MIDI is a "visual click".  The idea would be that a visual indicator could be included on the screen.  This could display beat counts (1,2,3,4...) or maybe some visual shape that changes with the beat as received via MIDI.  This would be useful for tracks that have portions of the song that are quiet or simply have no rhythm/percussive instruments playing.