Tuesday, 11/05/2024

For decades, MIDI files have been the lingua franca of electronic musicians. Representing music at the level of a musical score, as opposed to a performance as do audio files such as MP3, they allow compositions to be manipulated in ways creative musicians do orchestrated, assigned to different instruments, transposed to different keys, and adjusted in tempo, just to name a few. Most musicians work on MIDI files using special-purpose music editing programs called (for historical reasons) sequencers. These programs are ideally suited for capturing music as it is played and editing it into a final composition, but often lack the ability to easily apply transformations in bulk to large collections of music files (for example, changing instrument assignments for a set of files from those of one studio to another), algorithmically transforming music, or programmatically generating new music. MIDI files are stored in a compact binary form intended to optimise speed (and hence reduce latency) on limited speed MIDI channels, while not overly taxing the processing power of the humble microcontrollers employed by instruments in the epoch when MIDI was developed. While well-suited to its intended purposes, MIDI files are somewhat difficult to read and write without a special-purpose library, particularly in commonly used text processing languages such as Perl and Python which are otherwise ideally suited to the kinds of transformations one often wishes to apply to MIDI-encoded music. The midicsv and csvmidi programs allow you to use text processing tools to transform MIDI files or create them from scratch. midicsv converts a MIDI file into a Comma-Separated Value (CSV) text file, preserving all the information in the original MIDI file. The format of the CSV file is deliberately designed to facilitate processing by text manipulation tools. The csvmidi program reads CSV files in this format and creates an equivalent MIDI file. Processing a MIDI file through midicsv and then csvmidi will result in a completely equivalent (although, for technical reasons relating to options in MIDI file compression, not necessarily byte-for-byte identical) MIDI file.

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