Portmidi-Mapper¶ ↑

This is a small, incomplete wrapper around the portmidi c library.

It is the successor of my portmidi-ruby project which used ordinary ruby extensions which are a pain to write.

• portmidi (who woulda thought) built as a dynamic library. See below for special notes for Mac OS X Snow Leopard

• ffi (which in turn needs a sane build env to be installed)

The most important: Tests. I’m still pondering on how to test a library that has hardware requirements and dependencies (= MIDI hardware). So I guess it means I will mock away the portmidi layer to test my abstractions and add some optional integration test that will require a MIDI loopback configuration.

Implementation wise, there’s a few things missing:

• Setting Channel- and Message filters

• More different exceptions, plus support for Host Errors

• A lot of safety nets like testing for open devices before reading and writing and such.

The portmidi wrapper was thrown together by Jan Krutisch <jan@krutisch.de>

• Portmidi C-Library: Roger B. Dannenberg / Portmedia Framework Group

• Jan ‘half/byte’ Krutisch (github.com/halfbyte)

• Patches by

  • Thomas Jachmann (github.com/thomasjachmann)

• On MacOSX, there’s a homebrew recipe, so $ brew install portmidi should do the trick

• On most Linuxes, portmidi should be simply a package to install by your packagemanager

• On Windows: “try this”:sourceforge.net/apps/trac/portmedia/wiki/Installing%20portmidi%20on%20Windows