s-d-m / pianoterm-rs

A piano in your terminal

PIANOTERM-RS

Pianoterm-rs, as the name suggests, displays a piano in your terminal. It supports playing midi files, and waiting for events from a midi input port. Have a look at the following video to get a preview of what it does.

The video has no embedded sound in it, but the real program plays it.

License

Todo: choose a license

Build dependencies

pianoterm-rs is implemented in rust and uses cargo to manage the dependencies. If rust and cargo are not installed yet, follow the instructions decribe at https://www.rustup.rs/

Once rust and cargo are setup, simply compile using

 cargo build --release

How to use

Pianoterm-rs needs a midi sequencer to produce sound. On linux, you can use timidity. If you decided to use that one, you will need to run it first using:

timity -iA &

Then, you can list the midi "ports" using

./target/release/pianoterm-rs --list

This prints something like:

5 output ports found:
  0 -> Midi Through 14:0
  1 -> TiMidity 128:0
  2 -> TiMidity 128:1
  3 -> TiMidity 128:2
  4 -> TiMidity 128:3

Then you can then play a midi file through one of the former sequencer using:

./target/release/pianoterm-rs --output-port 1 <your_midi_file>

An example midi file is provided in the misc folder.

You might also connect a (virtual) keyboard to your computer and use it in place of the midi file. If such a keyboard is connected it must show up in the listing. E.g with a virtual midi keyboard player

./target/release/pianoterm-rs --list

This print something like:

6 output ports found:
  0 -> Midi Through 14:0
  1 -> VMPK Input 129:0
  2 -> TiMidity 130:0
  3 -> TiMidity 130:1
  4 -> TiMidity 130:2
  5 -> TiMidity 130:3

2 input ports found:
  0 -> Midi Through 14:0
  1 -> VMPK Output 128:0

Now run

./target/release/pianoterm-rs --input-port 1 --output-port 2

This will use the virtual keyboark (VMPK) as input, and will use TiMidity 130:0 as the midi sequencer.

Bugs & questions

Report bugs and questions to [e-mail]