Introduction

The MidiManager project is a simple wrapper for the javax.sound.midi library.

It defines an interface that handles midi events sent by a physical midi device, a wrapper to start a midi input and a wrapper to start a midi output.

Moreover it gives a simple GUI (using Swing) to list and select the device from the local computer.

SerialToMidi

is a tool that routes messages coming from a serial port to a midi device.

The messages on the serial port must follow an extremely simple protocol that follows these rules:

• one message per line (i.e. packets are separated by a carriage return)
• Control changes are represented as: cc ch 10 ctrl 12 val 130
• Notes ON are represented as: non ch 10 key 12 vel 120
• Notes OFF are represented as: noff ch 10 key 14 vel 120
• Aftertouches are represented as: at ch 10 key 14 tch 100

The library uses the Java Communications API implementation offered by the RXTX project which is compatible with all operating systems (I am using the implementation for Windows 7 64 bits). The standard implementation is much worse and does not support Windows anymore.

Another possibiliy for translating serial messages to MIDI would be using a Serial to Midi driver, which would act at the operating system level. The most famous driver is the Roland, but is quite old and does not support more recent OSs. A better (IMHO) driver is produced by Yamaha and can be downloaded here.

I have made several tests, but in the end I gave up and I decided to implement my own protocol as it was much more simple and powerful.