MIDI Programs
MIDI File Player (External Device)
MIDI Destination Pop-Up Button
Other Programs
Cocoa Sample Programs
Syntax Coloring Using Flex
Algorithms
Jazz Chord Analysis as Optimization
A blog where I will write mostly about programming in Cocoa and CoreMIDI, and experiences from my ports of Emacs and XEmacs to the Mac OS.
| Wild Life! |
Who needs a dog when you have this?
| Final Version of MidnamParserTest |
This will be the final version of the MIDI Name Document parser for now. It's been checked against all the MOTU .midnam files and it only fails on ones that are not well-formed (!). The following functionalities were added today.
- MIDICommands can now contain LocalControl, as well as ProgramChange, ControlChange, and SysEx.
- A bug in recognizing SysEx byte values was fixed.
- NoteNameList's may contain NoteGroup's, as well as Note's.
- StandardDeviceMode is now recognized. The parser can therefore handle documents for General MIDI device names now.
.midnam documents I found on the Web use them.
| Almost Full Feature MIDI Name Document Parser! |
Fixed and added many features to MidnamParser. Here is the result. Among the things added are the following.
- MIDICommands can now contain ProgramChange, ControlChange, and SysEx.
- DeviceModeEnable and DeviceModeDisable can now be used in CustomDeviceMode.
- NoteNameList are correctly parsed and UsesNoteNameList may appear in a Patch.
- The “physical entities”
<,>,&,', and"in names are now correctly converted to the corresponding characters.
.midnam documents I found on the Web, whether they're generated by CherryPicker or OMSNameDocXML, or converted from FreeMIDI by MOTU. I've checked that it works correctly on .midnam documents for the synths I have. A last bit I need to do tomorrow is to make it parse .midnam documents describing General MIDI devices. These documents use MasterDeviceNames, unlike ones for real synths which use CustomDeviceMode. This should be easy to do.After working with XML for a few days, I must say I can't understand the big hype on it. It's just regular expressions describing data formats. The dotcom era certainly bred people with little imagination :-).
| A MIDI Name Document Parser Prototype |
It didn't take as long as I thought. Here is the MIDI Name Document Parser I started to write. It parses a .midnam file generated by CherryPicker or OMSNameDocXML into an internal Foundation data structure composed only of NSDictionary, NSArray, NSNumber, and NSString components. For now, it dumps a description of that to output to demonstrate what it has parsed. The FCM framework will use this parser in the future to implement patch and note name selection.
[A technical note.] CherryPicker and OMSNameDocXML output files have different forms. CherryPicker embeds a PatchNameList in a PatchBank while OMSNameDocXML puts the PatchNameList at the end of the MasterDeviceNames. This “flexibility” in the definition of MIDINameDocument DTD seems to have very little merit. In any case the parser handles both cases correctly and generates the Foundation data structure in the same form. Once parsed into internal form, the data can be handled uniformly.
| MIDI Name Document Parser |
Started to write a MIDI Name Document parser. I got only as far as the CustomDeviceMode element now. The whole thing will probably take a few more days to finish. The purpose of the parser is to read .midnam files such as those generated by CherryPicker or OMSNameDocXML, or those distributed by MOTU, and build an internel data structure so that the FCM framework can make use of it to present patch and note names to the user for selection.
I also looked at a number of tools for working with XML files. Specifically, this XSL document can be used to pretty-print an XML file. To use it, you'll need an XSLT processor. I tried Saxon and Xalan-C++ but couldn't get them to work. Finally I found libxslt which worked for me. I use their xsltproc to pretty-print XML files and xmllint to re-indent XML files. The latter is useful for files such as those generated by the CFXMLTreeCreateXMLData function, which leaves out newlines.
| Generating XML Files |
Wrote some code today for generating XML files using Core Foundation's CFXMLTreeCreateXMLData function. Basically you build a tree using CFTree, CFXMLTree, and CFXMLNode functions and then CFXMLTreeCreateXMLData does everything for you. I know, one can write one's own routines for this or look for a library on the Internet. I'll be manipulating XML trees when I parse .midnam files so I might as well get intimate with the functions and data structures.
Although that looks like a lot of code for generating only a few lines of headers, the hardest part is over. The body of an XML file is represented entirely by kCFXMLNodeTypeElement nodes, although attribute lists, represented by CFDictionary objects, require some more code.
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