MIDITONES: Convert a MIDI file into a simple bytestream of notes MIDITONES compiles a MIDI music file into a much simplified compact time-ordered stream of commands, so that the music can easily be played on a small microcontroller-based synthesizer that has only simple tone generators. This is on github at www.github.com/LenShustek/miditones. Volume ("velocity") and instrument information in the MIDI file can either be discarded or kept. All the tracks are processed and merged into a single time-ordered stream of "note on", "note off", "change instrument" and "delay" commands. MIDITONES was written for the "Playtune" series of Arduino and Teensy microcontroller software synthesizers: www.github.com/LenShustek/arduino-playtune This original version of Playtune, first released in 2011, uses a separate hardware timer for each note to generate a square wave on an output pin. All the pins are then combined with a simple resistor network connected to a speaker and/or amplifier. It can only play as many simutaneous notes as there are timers. There is no volume modulation. www.github.com/LenShustek/Playtune_poll This second vesion uses only one hardware timer that interrupts periodically at a fast rate, and toggles square waves onto any number of digital output pins. It also implements primitive volume modulation by changing the duty cycle of the square wave. The number of simultaneous notes is limited only by the number of output pins and the speed of the processor. www.github.com/LenShustek/Playtune_samp The third version also uses only one hardware timer interrupting frequently, but uses the hardware digital-to-analog converter on high-performance microntrollers like the Teensy to generate an analog wave that is the sum of stored samples of sounds for many different instruments. The samples are scaled to the right frequency and volume, and any number of instrument samples can be used and mapped to MIDI patches. The sound quality is much better, although not in league with real synthesizers. It currently only supports Teensy boards. www.github.com/LenShustek/Playtune_synth The fourth version is an audio object for the PJRC Audio Library. https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_Audio.html It allows up to 16 simultaneous sound generators that are internally mixed, at the appropriate volume, to produce one monophonic audio stream. Sounds are created from sampled one-cycle waveforms for any number of instruments, each with its own attack-hold-decay-sustain-release envelope. Percussion sounds (from MIDI channel 10) are generated from longer sampled waveforms of a complete instrument strike. Each generator's volume is independently adjusted according to the MIDI velocity of the note being played before all channels are mixed. www.github.com/LenShustek/ATtiny-playtune This is a much simplified version that fits, with a small song, into an ATtiny processor with only 4K of flash memory. It also using polling with only one timer, and avoids multiplication or division at runtime for speed. It was written for the Evil Mad Scientist menorah kit: https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2009/new-led-hanukkah-menorah-kit/ https://forum.evilmadscientist.com/discussion/263/making-the-menorah-play-music (Imagine what you can do with the $1 8-pin ATtiny85 with a whopping 8K!) MIDITONES may also prove useful for other simple music synthesizers. There are various forks of the code, and the Playtune players, on Githib. *** THE PROGRAM MIDITONES is written in standard ANSI C and is meant to be executed from the command line. There is no GUI interface. The output can be either a C-language source code fragment that initializes an array with the command bytestream, or a binary file with the bytestream itself. The MIDI file format is complicated, and this has not been tested on all of its variations. In particular we have tested only format type "1", which seems to be what most of them are. Let me know if you find MIDI files that it won't digest and I'll see if I can fix it. There is a companion program in the same repository called Miditones_scroll that can convert the bytestream generated by MIDITONES into a piano-player like listing for debugging or annotation. See the documentation near the top of its source code. *** THE COMMAND LINE To convert a MIDI file called "chopin.mid" into a command bytestream, execute miditones chopin It will create a file in the same directory called "chopin.c" which contains the C-language statement to intiialize an array called "score" with the bytestream. The general form for command line execution is this: miditones The is the base name, without an extension, for the input and output files. It can contain directory path information, or not. The input file is .mid, and the output filename(s) are the base file name with .c, .h, .bin, and/or .log extensions. The following commonly-used command-line options can be specified: -v Add velocity (volume) information to the output bytestream -i Add instrument change commands to the output bytestream -pt Translate notes in the MIDI percussion track to note numbers 128..255 and assign them to a tone generator as usual. -d Generate a self-describing file header that says which optional bytestream fields are present. This is highly recommended if you are using later Playtune players that can check the header to know what data to expect. -b Generate a binary file with the name .bin, instead of a C-language source file with the name .c. -t=n Generate the bytestream so that at most "n" tone generators are used. The default is 6 tone generators, and the maximum is 16. The program will report how many notes had to be discarded because there weren't enough tone generators. The best combination of options to use with the later Playtune music players is: -v -i -pt -d The following are lesser-used command-line options: -c=n Only process the channel numbers whose bits are on in the number "n". For example, -c3 means "only process channels 0 and 1". In addition to decimal, "n" can be also specified in hex using a 0x prefix. -dp Generate Arduino IDE-dependent C code that uses PROGMEM for the bytestream. -k=n Change the musical key of the output by n chromatic notes. -k=-12 goes one octave down, -k=12 goes one octave up, etc. -lp Log input file parsing information to the .log file -lg Log output bytestream generation information to the .log file -n=x Put about "x" items on each line of the C file output -p Only parse the MIDI file, and don't generate an output file. Tracks are processed sequentially instead of being merged into chronological order. This is mostly useful for debugging MIDI file parsing problems. -pi Ignore notes in the MIDI percussion track 9 (also called 10 by some) -r Terminate the output file with a "restart" command instead of a "stop" command. -sn Use bytestream generation strategy "n". Two are currently implemented: 1:favor track 1 notes instead of all tracks equally 2:try to keep each track to its own tone generator -h Give command-line help. -delaymin=x Don't generate delays less than x milliseconds long, to reduce the number of "delay" commands and thus make the bytestream smaller, at the expense of moving notes slightly. The deficits are accumulated and eventually used, so that there is no loss of synchronization in the long term. The default is 0, which means timing is exact to the millisecond. -releasetime=x Stop each note x milliseconds before it is supposed to end. This results in better sound separation between notes. It might also allow more notes to be played with fewer tone generators, since there could be fewer simultaneous notes playing. -notemin=x The releasetime notwithstanding, don't let the resulting note be reduced to smaller than x milliseconds. Making releasetime very large and notemin small results in staccato sounds. -attacktime=x The high-volume attack phase of a note lasts x milliseconds, after which the lower-volume sustain phase begins, unless the release time makes it too short. (Only valid with -v.) -attacknotemax=x Notes larger than x milliseconds won't have the attack/sustain profile applied. That allows sustained organ-like pedaling. -sustainlevel=p The volume level during the sustain phase is p percent of the starting note volume. (Only valid with -v.) -scorename Use as the name of the score in the generated C code instead of "score", and name the file .h instead of .c. That allows multiple scores to be directly #included into an Arduino .ino file without modification. Note that for backwards compatibility and easier batch-file processing, the equal sign for specifying an option's numeric value may be omitted. Also, numeric values may be specified in hex as 0xhhhh. *** THE SCORE BYTESTREAM The generated bytestream is a series of commands to turn notes on and off, change instruments, and request a delay until the next event time. Here are the details, with numbers shown in hexadecimal. If the high-order bit of the byte is 1, then it is one of the following commands, where the two characters are a hex representation of one byte: 9t nn [vv] Start playing note nn on tone generator t, replacing any previous note. Generators are numbered starting with 0. The note numbers are the MIDI numbers for the chromatic scale, with decimal 69 being Middle A (440 Hz). If the -v option was given, the third byte specifies the note volume. 8t Stop playing the note on tone generator t. Ct ii Change tone generator t to play instrument ii from now on. This will only be generated if the -i option was given. F0 End of score; stop playing. E0 End of score, but start playing again from the beginning. This is generated by the -r option. If the high-order bit of the byte is 0, it is a command to delay for a while until the next note change. The other 7 bits and the 8 bits of the following byte are interpreted as a 15-bit big-endian integer that is the number of milliseconds to wait before processing the next command. For example, 07 D0 would cause a delay of 0x07d0 = 2000 decimal millisconds, or 2 seconds. Any tones that were playing before the delay command will continue to play. If the -d option is specified, the bytestream begins with a little header that tells what optional information will be in the data. This makes the file more self-describing, and allows music players to adapt to different kinds of files. The later Playtune players do that. The header looks like this: 'Pt' Two ascii characters that signal the presence of the header nn The length (in one byte) of the entire header, 6..255 ff1 A byte of flag bits, three of which are currently defined: 80 volume information is present 40 instrument change information is present 20 translated percussion notes are present ff2 Another byte of flags, currently undefined tt The number (in one byte) of tone generators actually used in this music. Any subsequent header bytes covered by the count, if present, are currently undefined and should be ignored by players. Len Shustek, 2011 to 2019; see the change log.