You may notice that when you purchase our software in the “store” that you may be given multiple releases to choose from. See the screenshot below. The purchase of $5 on October 19 has given access to two releases: 0.5.2 and 0.5.0.
Along with the recent release of McLaren Labs rtpmidi version 0.5.0, we have new ports to Raspberry Pi 4 Raspbian OS “Buster” and also Ubuntu… Read More »New releases – Raspberry Pi 4 and Ubuntu 19
This month McLaren Labs releases rtpmidi version 0.5.0 for Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi. This release brings some great new features, and also provides a few performance and installation improvements.
McLaren Labs rtpmidi has always supported the following message types with full Journal capability for sending and receiving. (Note: The Journal is part of the error correction mechanism that recovers lost messages that occur when sent over a network.)
With this release, we also add the following to provide a complete set of MIDI message types including System Exclusive.
Read More »McLaren Labs rtpmidi Version 0.5.0Network MIDI was invented sometime around 2004 to send MIDI messages over an IP network. To handle network loss, a protocol known as RTP-MIDI was created and documented as RFC-4695. Network MIDI is built into OSX computers and iOS devices. Apple music creators think nothing of connecting MIDI equipment using Ethernet and WiFi, instead of MIDI cables.
Sometime around 2009, Network MIDI was built into iPads and iPhones. This made building touch-based control surface Apps easy, and ensured they integrated with MIDI Workstations over WiFi. While this capability created many cool demos, the unpredictable latency and jitter of WiFi made MIDI-over-WiFi not attractive where timing is important. MIDI-over-Bluetooth became a standard in the last few years, and seems to be the preferred method for sending MIDI over wireless links.
But Network MIDI persists, and new implementations of the protocol as software pop up, as do new hardware products implementing the protocol. This article is a round-up of some of the implementations available in 2019.
Read More »The State of Network MIDI (2019)McLaren Labs was started with the idea that music and media creation on Linux should be as easy and fluid as Mac OSX. We had been inspired by AVFoundation and the modular way its pieces fit together. We loved being able to build media pipelines with sources and sinks that cleaned up after themselves when you were done with them them.
Many of the facets of the OSX components we liked were provided by ObjC features enabled by the Clang compiler and LLVM tool suite. LLVM has revolutionized language development by paving the way for Swift and Rust. Back at the time we were getting started, Swift on Linux was gaining traction and we considered adopting it. However, after some initial explorations with Swift and libdispatch, we discovered that libdispatch just wasn’t ready with Swift on Linux. That was in 2015 – Swift on Linux is much more mature. The equation might be different today … but it might not too.
Remote musical MIDI collaboration has been an interesting academic research area for years, but has not been explored by many casual musicians. One reason is that the complexity of software that brings MIDI and Networking together makes it a little bit of a daunting endeavor. We think it’s time to open exploration to more people and make remote MIDI collaboration as easy as joining a Hangout.
Back in 2001, a group of researchers at Berkeley began to experiment with remote musical collaboration [1]. The idea was see if musicians separated by some distance could collaborate in real time over a high-speed network. Rather than sending real-time audio signals, MIDI events were transmitted between instruments at two different locations.
Read More »Network Musical Performance and Cloud MIDI-Bridge
The Yamaha MD-BT01 is a nifty little MIDI 5-pin DIN to Bluetooth adapter. It plugs into the MIDI In/Out ports of MIDI controllers to connect wirelessly to a computer with Bluetooth. A typical use for this adapter is to connect legacy MIDI keyboards to a computer without using a 5-pin MIDI to USB adapter on the computer. Since most computers have Bluetooth built in these days, this makes for a tidy work-area since it eliminates at least one of the cables in your MIDI studio.
The MD-BT01 has a very smart appearance – it consists of just two large plugs connected by a single wire. It runs off of the current already provided by the 5-pin MIDI signal. Just plug it in, and it advertises itself as a Bluetooth MIDI connection point. Since it uses the Bluetooth MIDI standard, it can connect to many different devices. We tested it with Raspberry Pi and it works fine with Raspbian Stretch. If you have followed the steps in our previous article (https://mclarenlabs.com/blog/2019/01/15/korg-microkey-air-37-bluetooth-midi-keyboard-with-raspberry-pi/) then your Pi is ready to go.
Read More »Yamaha MD-BT01 Bluetooth MIDI adapter to Raspberry Pi
Do you want to have even more fun with your musical Raspberry Pi? Use an external Bluetooth MIDI keyboard with it! For this project, you need to download and compile a new version of the Bluetooth drivers for Linux. If you don’t already have compilation tools installed, you’ll need those too.
We will tell you how to compile and install the necessary Bluetooth driver, and then describe how to pair a Bluetooth MIDI Keyboard.
You should have a Raspberry Pi 3 with built-in Bluetooth adaptor and Raspbian Stretch OS.
Read More »Korg Microkey Air 37 Bluetooth MIDI Keyboard with Raspberry Pi