A Note About Live Coding in IRB with OSX

Apparently some versions of readline for OSX cause IRB to block thread-passing while it's waiting for user input at the prompt.

If you're experiencing problems live coding in IRB, such as starting the Diamond arpeggiator and nothing happening, it could be because of this. Unfortunately, as far as I know, the only way to fix it is to disable readline. You can do this by adding this line to ~/.irbrc

IRB.conf[:USE_READLINE] = false

This is annoying, because then you'll no longer have the ability to recall previously used commands and things like that. I've been meaning to get text editor based live coding up and running so maybe this is the time

MicroMIDI: a Ruby DSL for MIDI

After a month of moving I'm finally getting back into some music projects. I've got some more flashy things in the works but first here is a Ruby DSL called MicroMIDI that brings all of the MIDI projects mentioned in this post together along with some new tricks in to a package a bit more suited for live coding and one-off scripts.

Being that it's an interface for four libraries, there's a lot of functionality. I break down each concept in the following posts:

• Output
• MIDI thru and processing
• Binding custom input events
• Shorthand
• Sysex
• Etc

http://github.com/arirusso/micromidi

OSX: Unimidi, IAC and MIDI Patch Bay

Some quick instructions for routing MIDI between unimidi and other programs in OSX...

OSX (10.3 and above) has the ability built in to route MIDI between programs using something called Inter-Application Communication (IAC). IAC allows you to create a pair of virtual MIDI devices (an input and an output) that applications will see as though they are usual MIDI hardware devices. When you send MIDI instructions to the output, they show up at the input. Therefore, you can send MIDI to the output using one program and use the input in another program to receive the data.

You can control the IAC settings using the built-in Audio MIDI Setup applications in the utilities folder. That program allows you to create, edit and delete these virtual device pairs.



When Audio MIDI Setup is loaded you should see the window shown above. If you don't, select Show MIDI Window from the Window menu.

Double-click the IAC Driver icon. Click More Information if the Ports menu is not showing. Make sure that there is at least one port listed -- this represents a single pair of virtual devices.

When working with Ruby, select the IAC Driver from the list of unimidi inputs or outputs that corresponds to the port that you've created. For example, the first IAC Driver output in unimidi will correspond to the output for the first set of ports in Audio MIDI Setup.

You can list your unimidi devices by using unimidi list at the command line or using UniMIDI::Device.all in Ruby.

Once you have these concepts down, you also have the option of using MIDI Patch Bay for more complex routing and filtering.

Joe Le Brech made a video of using MIDI Patch Bay and IAC to send notes to GarageBand



He wrapped all of his Ruby code in a script called output.rb so you really can't see exactly what's going on the Ruby end of things...but it should give you a general idea of how this works