4 ms·

MIDI Editor

107 points by brudgers 3y ago

Rochus 3y ago
Nice, but there are already a lot of such tools. What is the core benefit of this one specifically compared to the others?
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Simplicity, very quick to for certain use cases. I use it all the time to time-align MIDI tracks to use them with pianojacq.com so that the scores look good and are beat perfect.
- brudgers 3y ago
  I am the OP. The advantage for me was it came up near the top of the Google search results, I downloaded it, and it did the thing I was trying to get done. In other words, for me it was good enough. So I didn’t spend time “shopping” and was able to pick up my creative work again quickly. If later it isn’t good enough, I can try something else.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    If you use it frequently: try to stay away from full screen, even just a hair under full screen in width and height seems to make it more stable, and try not to zoom in too far. Those two things alone seem to allow me to work much longer between crashes.
    - SushiHippie 3y ago
      Did you maybe want to reply to [0]? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38574234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38574234
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        No.
    - brudgers 3y ago
      Thanks. I am back on Windows these days and had to set the hi-dpi display on my old Dell to 1080 in order to read anything in MIDI Editor. But my use was just temporary to solve a specific problem. I used Musescore to write the final composition for my beginning music theory class at community college and wanted to load the MIDI into my QY700. But Musescore was adding an A3 metronome to its output when playing on all four channels and was setting all velocities to 0. So the recordings on the QY700 would require a lot of manual editing. Then Live Lite did not work the way that would be sensible (upper tiers do of course). Plus, deliberate dawlwessness means I am not very experienced with it. Anyway, I downloaded MIDI Editor and got the MIDI files into the QY700. Then once the pressure of the problem was gone, I had a play with Live Lite and figured out how I can write MIDI from it to the QY700 so I may not need MIDI Editor in near future workflows. But how I work is constantly changing…
- signaru 3y ago
  If it is just specifically MIDI editing that you need, a DAW can often be overkill. And when it is only MIDI editing, the (free/relatively updated) options are fewer. Sekaiju being my preferred tool, but there is also Aria Maestosa which seems less featured, but shows music notation and guitar tabs.
reactordev 3y ago
The software seems to be abandoned. There are dozens of issues and PR's open from several years back. Surely someone who was asking for donations would be attentive of the software of which those donations are based, no?
- vjvjvj 3y ago
  exactly. when you donate to an open source project you aren't supporting past development at all. you are instead entitled to getting whatever feature implemented you want.
  - mksybr 3y ago
    If you donate to an open source project you are entitled to getting whatever feature implemented? /s?
    - shric 3y ago
      > /s? I thought the GP was so obviously sarcasm that it didn't need an explicit tag
      - lagniappe 3y ago
        I hate those stupid tags anyway. If it needs an /s it can be articulated better another way.
        InCityDreams 3y ago
        Yeah, right.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  Perhaps they stopped maintaining it due to the lack of support.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Hm... maybe I should make the owner an offer? I definitely think this software should be preserved.
guseyn 3y ago
This is one is also good: unisonofficial.com
- ipsum2 3y ago
  That's not a MIDI editor, its a custom music language. Also it's paid, not open source.
- paradox460 3y ago
  Why use this when you could just use Lilypond, which is free, open source, and has a legacy in TeX: https://lilypond.org https://lilypond.org
unleaded 3y ago
sorry to add to the somewhat negative comments but I used to use this for editing MIDIs and I eventually moved to Sekaiju http://openmidiproject.opal.ne.jp/Sekaiju_en.html http://openmidiproject.opal.ne.jp/Sekaiju_en.html , it's a lot nicer for doing more complex/low-level MIDI work although the UI is a bit painful and it's kind of slow but that might just be my old computer and/or Wine. it's also free and open source (or as FOSS as a win32 application can be if that bothers you)
- ale42 3y ago
  Sekaiju looks good, thanks for mentioning it!
- kazinator 3y ago
  I was interested in Sekaiju a decade ago and I cloned a repository of it to do some patching. I converted all the JIS source code to UTF-8. (If you're gonna be 世界中 (sekaijuu -- world-wide, world-over) then use Unicode, man). https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/sekaiju https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/sekaiju
  - unleaded 3y ago
    I just checked and it looks like most of them are in UTF-8 now, but not all of them for some reason like SekaijuView.cpp
    - kazinator 3y ago
      I seem to remember exchanging e-mails with kuzu. But I can't find any of them!? Not even my bugfixes were upstreamed and I'm not mentioned in the contributors page anywhere. I had to fix things just to make it fully usable. It had issues opening devices, and a crash also.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  What I love about midieditor is that it is FOSS and works natively on Linux.
ipsum2 3y ago
Crashes frequently doing normal operations like panning on Windows.
FluffySamoyed 3y ago
I used this software some time ago to edit a couple MIDI files with mouse and (computer) keyboard, mainly for altering melody tracks, fixing some wrong chords and adding drums. I found this tool pretty intuitive to use and liked it a lot. I had previously tried Sekaiju and another tool whose name I forgot, but I felt like they were aimed at more experienced users and assumed a higher level of knowledge about MIDI terms and concepts (of which I know very little), so much of the interface went over my head. MIDI Editor was good enough for my simpler use case.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  I compare it to Paintshop Pro: it may not be Photoshop, but that's an advantage if you don't actually need Photoshop.
jacquesm 3y ago
Funny to see this here. I use it all the time, but it tends to crash too often so be sure to save your work frequently. It is very good when it does work though and I wished I could motivate the author to fix the bugs. I'd put the time in myself if I had a development environment set up for it.
adamrezich 3y ago
any other good general-purpose MIDI editors? my friends and I used Anvil Studio a lot back in the day despite it being kind of atrocious—always wondered if there was something better out there these days
- somat 3y ago
  LMMS appears to work as such. I have to admit I am not a musician and my only use of it was to test some midi control input from a midi dials and buttons box I was playing with. So it may be terrible for actual music creation for all I know. https://lmms.io/ https://lmms.io/ Update: so I looked at it a bit, still not a musician but it looks like lmms can only export single midi tracks at a time. So probably useless for actually creating a midi song. If you really wanted to beat your self up you could set up each track as a midi output channel, then play the song while recording the midi stream. But that does not sound like much fun to me.
  - unleaded 3y ago
    Until/unless it gets fixed LMMS is awful for working with MIDI files, it puts all the events on one channel and there's no way around it other than maybe saving each track as a separate file and combining them with something else..
    - unleaded 3y ago
      https://lmms.io/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33561#p78706 https://lmms.io/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33561#p78706 "Not many devs have the requisite knowledge of MIDI" ..in a DAW?
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    LMMS is very limited. You also can't open existing midi files in it and then edit them and save them again.
- livrem 3y ago
  Back in the day there was a very nice and simple little MIDI sequencer for X-Windows called Seq24 that I used every now and then. Of course there are much more complex music software that also happens to have MIDI-support (LMMS, Renoise, ...) but I liked Seq24 because it only did short MIDI patterns and had quite good GUI (holding down various modifiers and using the different mouse-buttons to do most edits). Searching I get a link to a URL that looks like it could have been the Seq24 home page, but Firefox throws up a security warning for that domain. There is also a hit for this project that claims to be based on Seq24 and that has commits as recently as a few days ago, so maybe this is worth looking at: https://github.com/ahlstromcj/seq66 https://github.com/ahlstromcj/seq66
TheActualWalko 3y ago
If you're looking for a free app to edit MIDI, check out wavtool.com! We're not open source, but our free product has pretty good MIDI editing for conventional use cases. There's also an interactive MIDI composition AI model.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  It just had to be 'SaaS'. Sorry, but now, not paying you a monthly fee.
dkga 3y ago
Rust port in 3, 2, … :)
- jacquesm 3y ago
  If only. I see a ton of 'rust port of 'x'' announcements when they start but I have a hard time recalling one that is finished and then maintained for at least a couple of years.
dima55 3y ago
Aren't there a million of these? I used rosegarden something like 20 years ago. Still looks like it's around, and looks far nicer than it was! Go `apt install rosegarden`
atoav 3y ago
For power users I want to recommend checking out helio.fm ("libre music composition software") at https://helio.fm/ https://helio.fm/ The UI isn't 100% self explainatory, but incredibly sleek and probably worth learning if you compose/edit midi a lot.

107 points by brudgers 3y ago

Nice, but there are already a lot of such tools. What is the core benefit of this one specifically compared to the others?

jacquesm 3y ago
Simplicity, very quick to for certain use cases. I use it all the time to time-align MIDI tracks to use them with pianojacq.com so that the scores look good and are beat perfect.
brudgers 3y ago
I am the OP. The advantage for me was it came up near the top of the Google search results, I downloaded it, and it did the thing I was trying to get done. In other words, for me it was good enough. So I didn’t spend time “shopping” and was able to pick up my creative work again quickly. If later it isn’t good enough, I can try something else.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  If you use it frequently: try to stay away from full screen, even just a hair under full screen in width and height seems to make it more stable, and try not to zoom in too far. Those two things alone seem to allow me to work much longer between crashes.
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    Did you maybe want to reply to [0]? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38574234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38574234
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      No.
  - brudgers 3y ago
    Thanks. I am back on Windows these days and had to set the hi-dpi display on my old Dell to 1080 in order to read anything in MIDI Editor. But my use was just temporary to solve a specific problem. I used Musescore to write the final composition for my beginning music theory class at community college and wanted to load the MIDI into my QY700. But Musescore was adding an A3 metronome to its output when playing on all four channels and was setting all velocities to 0. So the recordings on the QY700 would require a lot of manual editing. Then Live Lite did not work the way that would be sensible (upper tiers do of course). Plus, deliberate dawlwessness means I am not very experienced with it. Anyway, I downloaded MIDI Editor and got the MIDI files into the QY700. Then once the pressure of the problem was gone, I had a play with Live Lite and figured out how I can write MIDI from it to the QY700 so I may not need MIDI Editor in near future workflows. But how I work is constantly changing…
signaru 3y ago
If it is just specifically MIDI editing that you need, a DAW can often be overkill. And when it is only MIDI editing, the (free/relatively updated) options are fewer. Sekaiju being my preferred tool, but there is also Aria Maestosa which seems less featured, but shows music notation and guitar tabs.

reactordev 3y ago

The software seems to be abandoned. There are dozens of issues and PR's open from several years back. Surely someone who was asking for donations would be attentive of the software of which those donations are based, no?

vjvjvj 3y ago
exactly. when you donate to an open source project you aren't supporting past development at all. you are instead entitled to getting whatever feature implemented you want.
- mksybr 3y ago
  If you donate to an open source project you are entitled to getting whatever feature implemented? /s?
  - shric 3y ago
    > /s? I thought the GP was so obviously sarcasm that it didn't need an explicit tag
    - lagniappe 3y ago
      I hate those stupid tags anyway. If it needs an /s it can be articulated better another way.
      - InCityDreams 3y ago
        Yeah, right.
anigbrowl 3y ago
Perhaps they stopped maintaining it due to the lack of support.
jacquesm 3y ago
Hm... maybe I should make the owner an offer? I definitely think this software should be preserved.

guseyn 3y ago

This is one is also good: unisonofficial.com

ipsum2 3y ago
That's not a MIDI editor, its a custom music language. Also it's paid, not open source.
paradox460 3y ago
Why use this when you could just use Lilypond, which is free, open source, and has a legacy in TeX: https://lilypond.org https://lilypond.org

unleaded 3y ago

sorry to add to the somewhat negative comments but I used to use this for editing MIDIs and I eventually moved to Sekaiju http://openmidiproject.opal.ne.jp/Sekaiju_en.html http://openmidiproject.opal.ne.jp/Sekaiju_en.html , it's a lot nicer for doing more complex/low-level MIDI work although the UI is a bit painful and it's kind of slow but that might just be my old computer and/or Wine. it's also free and open source (or as FOSS as a win32 application can be if that bothers you)

ale42 3y ago
Sekaiju looks good, thanks for mentioning it!
kazinator 3y ago
I was interested in Sekaiju a decade ago and I cloned a repository of it to do some patching. I converted all the JIS source code to UTF-8. (If you're gonna be 世界中 (sekaijuu -- world-wide, world-over) then use Unicode, man). https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/sekaiju https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/sekaiju
- unleaded 3y ago
  I just checked and it looks like most of them are in UTF-8 now, but not all of them for some reason like SekaijuView.cpp
  - kazinator 3y ago
    I seem to remember exchanging e-mails with kuzu. But I can't find any of them!? Not even my bugfixes were upstreamed and I'm not mentioned in the contributors page anywhere. I had to fix things just to make it fully usable. It had issues opening devices, and a crash also.
jacquesm 3y ago
What I love about midieditor is that it is FOSS and works natively on Linux.

ipsum2 3y ago

Crashes frequently doing normal operations like panning on Windows.

FluffySamoyed 3y ago

I used this software some time ago to edit a couple MIDI files with mouse and (computer) keyboard, mainly for altering melody tracks, fixing some wrong chords and adding drums. I found this tool pretty intuitive to use and liked it a lot. I had previously tried Sekaiju and another tool whose name I forgot, but I felt like they were aimed at more experienced users and assumed a higher level of knowledge about MIDI terms and concepts (of which I know very little), so much of the interface went over my head. MIDI Editor was good enough for my simpler use case.

jacquesm 3y ago
I compare it to Paintshop Pro: it may not be Photoshop, but that's an advantage if you don't actually need Photoshop.

jacquesm 3y ago

Funny to see this here. I use it all the time, but it tends to crash too often so be sure to save your work frequently. It is very good when it does work though and I wished I could motivate the author to fix the bugs. I'd put the time in myself if I had a development environment set up for it.

adamrezich 3y ago

any other good general-purpose MIDI editors? my friends and I used Anvil Studio a lot back in the day despite it being kind of atrocious—always wondered if there was something better out there these days

somat 3y ago
LMMS appears to work as such. I have to admit I am not a musician and my only use of it was to test some midi control input from a midi dials and buttons box I was playing with. So it may be terrible for actual music creation for all I know. https://lmms.io/ https://lmms.io/ Update: so I looked at it a bit, still not a musician but it looks like lmms can only export single midi tracks at a time. So probably useless for actually creating a midi song. If you really wanted to beat your self up you could set up each track as a midi output channel, then play the song while recording the midi stream. But that does not sound like much fun to me.
- unleaded 3y ago
  Until/unless it gets fixed LMMS is awful for working with MIDI files, it puts all the events on one channel and there's no way around it other than maybe saving each track as a separate file and combining them with something else..
  - unleaded 3y ago
    https://lmms.io/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33561#p78706 https://lmms.io/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33561#p78706 "Not many devs have the requisite knowledge of MIDI" ..in a DAW?
- jacquesm 3y ago
  LMMS is very limited. You also can't open existing midi files in it and then edit them and save them again.
livrem 3y ago
Back in the day there was a very nice and simple little MIDI sequencer for X-Windows called Seq24 that I used every now and then. Of course there are much more complex music software that also happens to have MIDI-support (LMMS, Renoise, ...) but I liked Seq24 because it only did short MIDI patterns and had quite good GUI (holding down various modifiers and using the different mouse-buttons to do most edits). Searching I get a link to a URL that looks like it could have been the Seq24 home page, but Firefox throws up a security warning for that domain. There is also a hit for this project that claims to be based on Seq24 and that has commits as recently as a few days ago, so maybe this is worth looking at: https://github.com/ahlstromcj/seq66 https://github.com/ahlstromcj/seq66

TheActualWalko 3y ago

If you're looking for a free app to edit MIDI, check out wavtool.com! We're not open source, but our free product has pretty good MIDI editing for conventional use cases. There's also an interactive MIDI composition AI model.

jacquesm 3y ago
It just had to be 'SaaS'. Sorry, but now, not paying you a monthly fee.

dkga 3y ago

Rust port in 3, 2, … :)

jacquesm 3y ago
If only. I see a ton of 'rust port of 'x'' announcements when they start but I have a hard time recalling one that is finished and then maintained for at least a couple of years.

dima55 3y ago

Aren't there a million of these? I used rosegarden something like 20 years ago. Still looks like it's around, and looks far nicer than it was! Go `apt install rosegarden`

atoav 3y ago

For power users I want to recommend checking out helio.fm ("libre music composition software") at https://helio.fm/ https://helio.fm/ The UI isn't 100% self explainatory, but incredibly sleek and probably worth learning if you compose/edit midi a lot.