PIANOTERM

Pianoterm, as the name suggests, displays a piano in your terminal. It supports playing midi files, and waiting for events from a midi input port. Have a look at the following video to get a preview of what it does.

The video has no embedded sound in it, but the real program plays it.

License

Todo: choose a license

Build dependencies

Pianoterm requires a C++11 compiler to build (clang++-3.5 and g++-4.9 are both fine). It also depends on the following libraries:

• libRtMidi
• termbox

Also note that pianoterm does not play music itself. Instead it relies on a system-wide midi sequencer. On GNU/Linux you might consider installing timidity

On debian, one can install them the following way:

sudo apt-get install timidity librtmidi-dev librtmidi2 g++-4.9

Unfortunately the termbox library is not packaged by debian so you need to compile and install it too. To do so:

git clone --depth 1 'https://github.com/nsf/termbox'
cd termbox
./waf configure # requires python
./waf
sudo ./waf install

Compiling instructions

Once all the dependencies have been installed, you can simply compile pianoterm by entering:

make

This will generate the pianoterm binary in ./bin

How to use

Pianoterm needs a midi sequencer. If you decided to use timidity, you will need to run it first using:

timity -iA &

Then, you can list the midi "ports" using

./bin/pianoterm --list

This prints something like:

5 output ports found:
  0 -> Midi Through 14:0
  1 -> TiMidity 128:0
  2 -> TiMidity 128:1
  3 -> TiMidity 128:2
  4 -> TiMidity 128:3

Then you can then play a midi file through one of the former sequencer using:

./bin/pianoterm --output-port 1 <your_midi_file>

An example midi file is provided in the misc folder.

You might also connect a (virtual) keyboard to your computer and use it in place of the midi file. If such a keyboard is connected it must show up in the listing. E.g with a virtual midi keyboard player

./bin/pianoterm --list

This print something like:

6 output ports found:
  0 -> Midi Through 14:0
  1 -> VMPK Input 129:0
  2 -> TiMidity 130:0
  3 -> TiMidity 130:1
  4 -> TiMidity 130:2
  5 -> TiMidity 130:3

2 input ports found:
  0 -> Midi Through 14:0
  1 -> VMPK Output 128:0

Now run

./bin/pianoterm --input-port 1 --output-port 2

This will use the virtual keyboark (VMPK) as input, and will use TiMidity 130:0 as the midi sequencer.

Other files you may want to read

todo.txt contains a list of things that I still need to do.

Bugs & questions

Report bugs and questions to [email protected] (I trust the anti spam filter)