midi_io 1.0.3

Midi interface inspired by WebMIDI

Midi IO

Midi IO is a Web MIDI inspired Flutter plugin for reading and sending data to MIDI devices. It abstracts away Android's Midi and Apple's CoreMidi and provides an easy to use, consistent API for interfacing with MIDI devices.

Under Development

This Plugin is under active development and may have bugs. Contributions in the form of code or bug reports are welcomed!

Features

• A sane API that hides away platform inconsistencies
• Connect to any number of devices simultaneously
• Read MIDI messages using Dart Streams
• Write MIDI data as simple lists

Getting Started

Midi is the starting point to working with the platform's MIDI system. You can instantiate this class by simply calling its constructor:

import 'package:midi_io/midi_io.dart';

final midi = Midi();

Writing MIDI to devices

You write to a MIDI MidiDestinationPort.

This is the equivalent to [MIDIOutput] in WebMIDI, an MidiInputPort in Android, and a Destination in CoreMIDI. You can see the confusing inconsistencies between platforms. So, if you want to send data, you send it to a DestinationPort.

Getting available destinations

You use Midi to get the list of destinations currently connected to the device:

final List<MidiDestinationPort> destinations = await midi.getDestinations();

You can enumerate this list to find a specific device. Note that on both Android and iOS, port.id changes based on the order devices are connected, whether they are disconnected and reconnected. So, the most reliable way to identify a port is by its name.

Sending data

Once you have a port you can open it and send it data:

MidiDestinationPort p = destinations[0];
await p.open();
// send a note on message, Middle C, full volume
await p.send([0x90, 60, 127]);

Reading From Midi Devices

You read from MidiSourcePorts. The process for finding and opening sources is similar to destinations:

final List<MidiSourcePort> sources = await midi.getSources();

Listening to data

You subscribe to a Stream of messages to read from devices. This plugin automatically converts the raw byte stream into discreet MIDI messages for you.

MidiSourcePort p = sources[0];
await p.open();

Stream<Uint8List> data = p.messages;

await for (message in data) {
  print(message);
}

Depending on the device and your use case you might find this stream to be a bit noisy with MIDI Clock messages. In that case, you can take advantage of Stream filters to hide the messages you aren't interested in. The plugin provides a filter for removing Clock messages from the data.

Stream<Uint8List> data = p.messages.where( excludeClock );

await for (message in data) {
  // awesome, no more clock messages
  print(message);
}

Listening to device changes

In a typical MIDI environment, devices can be connected and disconnected at any time. the getSources and getDestinations methods give you the list of devices currently connected. If you wish to listen to changes, you can subscribe to [ConnectionEvent]s:

Stream<ConnectionEvent> changes = midi.onDevicesChanged;

await for (event in changes) {
  print(event);
}

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

• Please read and understand the Code of Conduct
• The goal is to keep close to the WebMIDI spec
• It's difficult to diagnose bugs when the scope of MIDI use cases is so broad. If you can provide reproducible steps, or a list of midi messages that cause problems, that's great

Android

We are wrapping android.media.midi. In order to implement something like WebMIDI we are hiding away MidiDevice entirely, and only presenting ports to the user. Also keep in mind that the names of input/output in Android are the opposite of WebMIDI, which is why this package has settled on the terms source and destination.

iOS / MacOS

The implementations for iOS and MacOS are identical (hey is there a way to tell Flutter to use the same code?). The implementations are based on WebMidiKit, a Swift wrapper around CoreMIDI. Unfortunately WebMidiKit seems to be abandoned, and was never published to cocoapods. To work around this issue, we paste a copy of WebMidiKit into the iOS and MacOS implementation folders.