orivej / mma-mode

Emacs major mode for mma (Musical MIDI Accompaniment)

mma.el

Emacs major mode for mma: Musical MIDI Accompaniment

This is a majore mode to edit and play MMA files.

It is based on an original version from Vu Ngoc San.

Enhancements:

• Buffer selection preview.

  This function looks for a sentinel // End of Preamble in the current buffer. If found, everything from the start of the buffer up to and including this line will be written to a temp file.

  The content of the current selection is appended to the file and then an mma compile will process this file and play it. This makes it easy to quickly play selected portions of the MMA song in progress.

• Force MMA files to be encoded in Latin1, MMA cannot handle Unicode yet.

The MMA program is written by Bob van der Poel. See his MMA site for details on the MMA program.

Original version and disclaimer:

(C) 2005-2014 VU NGOC San

This is written for Emacs-23 and should work for emacs-22. No guarantee for older emacsen.

By the way, this mode is pretty minimalistic. I just wrote the features I needed. Any suggestion for improvement is welcome.

Installation

Copy the file lisp/mma.el to a place where it can be found by Emacs (a place that is in Emacs' load-path).

In your .emacs add the following lines:

(autoload 'mma-mode "mma" "mma music file mode" t)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist
             '("\\.mma$" . mma-mode))

Then when you open a .mma file you should have a Mma menu in the menu-bar. It shows the keyboard shortcuts as well.

If you want the MMA 'compile' and 'midi player' buffers to be shown in a separate window, add the following to your .emacs:

(eval-after-load "mma"
  '(progn
    (add-to-list 'special-display-buffer-names
                 (mma-compilation-buffer-name))
    (add-to-list 'special-display-buffer-names
                 (mma-midi-player-buffer-name))))

MIDI players

This mode is originally written for using the midi player xplayer, aplaymidi or the timidity midi synthesizer. Other programms can be used via the Mma menu.

You can set your default midi player in your .emacs, for instance, add:

(setq mma-midi-player "/usr/bin/aplaymidi")
(setq mma-midi-player-arg "-p 128:0")

An alternate midi player:

(setq mma-midi-player "/usr/bin/playmidi")
(setq mma-midi-player-arg "-e -D /dev/midi")

License

You are free to do whatever you want with this file as long as you include credits to the original author.

Hints

Use aplaymidi to get the list of midi ports

aplaymidi -l

or:

aplaymidi -l | sed -ne 's/^\([0-9]*:[0-9]*\).*$/\1/p'