MIDI::Music - Perl interface to /dev/music. Version 0.01 Description MIDI::Music is a high-level interface to /dev/music, and is designed to function on any *NIX system supported by Open Sound System v.3.8 or higher. Playback through internal and external MIDI devices is supported, as is the "recording" of events from an external device. Additional goals in designing MIDI::Music were: 1. to provide an API with as few methods necessary to satisfy 99% of MIDI programmers' purposes. 2. to provide easy integration with Sean M. Burke's MIDI-Perl suite by means of a common event specification. There are, at present, essentially three things you can do with MIDI::Music: 1. Play a MIDI file. 2. Play a series of events defined in an event structure, which is a LoL as described in the the MIDI::Event manpage documentation. 3. Read a series events from an external device. These events are returned as the same type of event structure as in [2]. Requirements 1. You must have Open Sound System v.3.8 or greater installed on your system. For "realtime" support in recording (see MIDI::Music POD), the commercial version of OSS is, to the author's knowledge, necessary. OSS is available from the 4Front Technologies website: http://www.opensound.com/ 2. In order to use the playmidifile() method for playing standard MIDI files, Sean Burke's MIDI-Perl modules must be installed. MIDI-Perl is available from the CPAN: http://www.cpan.org/ Download The latest version may be downloaded from the MIDI::Music homepage: http://www.pdamusic.com/computer/midi-music.html Installation If you have OSSLib installed, edit Makefile.PL so that the variable "$OSSPATH" points to the appropriate location (if you have the commercial release of OSS installed, $OSSPATH should point to the directory in which you installed it). Then, the usual: perl Makefile.PL make make test (optional) make install To Do * Add methods for obtaining synthesizer information (number, types of available devices). * At present, MIDI::Music supports the interface with only one open device at a time. Future versions will allow for simultaneous instances of initialized devices, if possible. * At present, system-exclusive events (produced by bulk dumps, etc.) are not included in the event structures returned by the readevents() manpage. This should be fixed in the next release. * Streamline the playmidifile() code for greater memory-efficiency, if possible. Author Seth David Johnson seth@pdamusic.com Copyright Copyright (c) 2001 Seth David Johnson. All Rights Reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. See Also The Open Sound System homepage (4Front Technologies): http://www.opensound.com/ The OSS Programming Guide (PDF), describing in some detail the /dev/music API on which MIDI::Music is based: http://www.opensound.com/pguide/oss.pdf Sean M. Burke's MIDI-Perl extensions provide methods for dealing with MIDI files; you will need to have them installed if you wish to use the playmidifile() method. The documentation for the MIDI::Events manpage provides a description of the "event structures" common to MIDI::Music and MIDI-Perl. Alex McLean's experimental the MIDI::Realtime manpage is an earlier attempt to provide a synthesizer interface to Perl. MIDI::Realtime takes an entirely different approach both in terms of interface and in terms of implementation, and may be better suited than MIDI::Music to specific purposes. The aforementioned extensions can be obtained from the CPAN: http://www.cpan.org/