10 KiB
MIDI clips and instrument
Phase 7 supports drawing persisted notes and live JACK MIDI input. Record still captures audio to WAV: MIDI capture and Standard MIDI File import are deferred.
Workflow
Add/select a track in Sequencer, choose Add MIDI clip, then Piano roll (Ctrl+4).
Creation adds an instrument-to-output route if no instrument exists. Existing
instruments retain their routes; use Modular Graph to connect them as needed.
Scheduled MIDI clips now apply their track mix/automation before summing to
paired stereo instrument buffers; live input stays centered and unassigned. No hardware ports
are connected automatically. Connect a MIDI source to the backend's midi_in
JACK port, and route audio output explicitly to hear it while Play is running.
The piano roll shows all 128 pitches and edits clip-source time. Click blank space to draw a one-beat note (velocity 100, filtered channel or channel 0); drag its body to move it, drag the right edge to resize, or right-click/Delete to remove it. Edits snap to the configured grid (default 1/16). Escape cancels a drag. Trimmed-out source notes remain editable and are preserved. Arrangement/note edits stop playback and are blocked during audio recording. Save/Open preserves MIDI flags, notes and stable IDs.
Timing and ownership
The C model owns up to 4096 notes per project, with source-relative ticks at 960 ticks/quarter and constant tempo. Control-thread preparation intersects notes with clip trims and converts boundaries to integer sample positions. Scheduled rendering uses absolute note age: block partitions do not change samples, and seeking into a note chases its phase. Clip ends cut notes off. The instrument source has its own buffer, separate from external audio input and WAV timeline playback, and routes through the ordinary graph.
Prepared ranges are immutable; only their audio owner changes voice/panic state. Preparation allocates; rendering uses bounded preallocated storage and performs no allocation, freeing, I/O, locks, logging or GUI calls. Project preparation builds audio and MIDI candidates before committing the stopped backend state.
JACK events have sample offsets within the current block. Supported messages are complete note on/off (including velocity-zero note on) and CC120/123 on channels 0..15, plus CC7 volume, CC10 pan and CC64 sustain (see CONTROL.md). Equal-offset events retain input order. Bend, program changes, running status and SysEx are unsupported. At most 256 events are accepted per block. Malformed/overflowed input discards that block's events and triggers panic, with a MIDI-drop status counter.
Recovery and limits
Panic/F9 clears live voices and suppresses scheduled notes already started; future timeline notes can still start. CC120/123 does this for its channel. Stop/start and seek clear live voices and reset suppression, allowing timeline notes to be chased again. MIDI port disconnection, xruns and callback processing failures request panic. Control requests use lock-free generation counters; voice state changes on the audio thread, or while stopped.
The sine instrument scales amplitude by 0.1 times velocity/127. It supports 32 simultaneous scheduled notes and a separate 32 live voices; live overflow steals the oldest voice, and repeated channel/pitch retriggers it. Preparation rejects more than 32 overlapping scheduled notes with CAPACITY. Such metadata can be saved by the C model, but GUI Open/Play rejects it until overlap is reduced. Immediate note-off/stealing can click; there is no envelope or limiter, and summed voices can exceed unity. Above-Nyquist pitches are silent. There is no per-track/channel instrument routing, MIDI recording, SMF import or piano-roll zoom yet. Note edits participate in project snapshot undo/redo.
Verification
make test checks exact onset/off samples, block partition independence, trim,
seek, panic, channel handling, voice/event limits, persistence migration and
malformed files, plus callback fault recovery. make test-gui draws, moves and
resizes notes with FLTK events, then saves/reopens and renders them.
make test-jack-midi uses only software MIDI/audio ports to verify live on/off,
panic, disconnection and saved/reopened scheduled playback. JACK port discovery
may lag activation under PipeWire; the test waits before connecting.
Physical MIDI devices, bridge/device loss behind an unchanged port, latency and
long-running performance remain unverified. Panic/Stop provides manual recovery.
Phase 8 adds track mixing, automation and project undo/redo; see MIXER.md.
Phase 21 composition commands
The piano-roll Notes menu exposes these commands. Shortcuts apply while the piano roll has focus; use the main window Edit menu for undo/redo.
| Command | Shortcut | Behavior |
|---|---|---|
| Grid | G | 1, 120, 160, 240, 320, 480 or 960 ticks |
| Filter | F | Channel -1 (all) or 0..15, inclusive pitch range 0..127 |
| Velocity and channel | V | Set either property; -1 preserves it |
| Quantize | Q | Snap starts to nearest configured grid; ties go later |
| Transpose | T / Up / Down | Semitone count / one semitone up / down |
| Repeat | Ctrl+D | Additional copies at a positive source-tick spacing |
| Select filtered | Ctrl+A | Select every note matching the current clip filter |
| Delete | Delete | Remove the single selected note or all filtered notes |
160 ticks is a sixteenth-note triplet; 320 is an eighth-note triplet. The grid governs drawing, drag movement and minimum resize duration. At 1-tick snap the visual grid remains 120 ticks to stay legible at the fixed zoom. The header shows current grid, channel/pitch filter and selection scope. Velocity also affects unselected note brightness. Preferences are session-only.
Click selects one visible note; Ctrl+A selects the whole filtered set. A click or filter change clears that set selection. Hidden notes cannot be mouse-edited. A channel filter also sets the channel for newly drawn notes. No lasso or arbitrary disjoint multi-selection is provided. Moving/resizing uses the mouse; V edits velocity/channel without changing timing, pitch or IDs. Quantization changes starts only, preserving durations and other properties. Repetition keeps originals and gives every copy a fresh stable ID; spacing need not equal note length, so both overlapping patterns and rests are possible. The existing clip source must have room for every result; extend it in Sequencer first if needed. Source notes outside the visible arrangement trim remain editable.
All batch edits validate before mutation. Invalid pitch/range, copy counts, capacity overflow or a note crossing the source boundary rejects the entire operation; notes are never silently clamped, merged or shortened. Unmatched notes, notes in other clips and unrelated properties are preserved. Each successful command records one undo step and stops playback before model edits; Play prepares the new engine plan. Undo/redo reinstalls the corresponding plan. These edits use the existing persisted note fields; format remains v7.
Scheduled notes occupy [start,end), with ends counted before starts at an equal sample for the 32-voice limit. Overlapping same-channel/pitch scheduled notes are independent sine voices; adjacent repetitions restart phase. Live repeated notes instead retrigger the matching channel/pitch voice, and a note-off releases that voice (or defers release under sustain). Equal-sample live on/off/control messages execute in caller/JACK order, with no implicit priority reordering. The renderer rejects malformed/unsorted/out-of-range events before touching output or runtime; raw velocity-zero note-ons decode to note-off.
make test-composition covers filters, property preservation, triplet rounding,
repeats/fresh IDs, rejected batch rollback, capacity, undo snapshots, equal-offset
live order, adjacent/overlapping notes, exact block partitions and seek chase.
make test-gui covers mouse edits and the new commands with undo/redo and engine
reinstallation. Listening and physical MIDI-device validation remain pending.
Phase 26: CC7/10/64 are defaults, configurable per channel through Audio → MIDI controller mapping. Disabled/unmapped CCs have no effect; CC120/123 stay panic. Decode accepts valid CC0..127 messages within the existing event budget. See CONTROL.md for the exact bindings, ramp, sustain and automation precedence rules.
Phase 32 instrument support
MIDI tracks can bind CLAP, VST2 and VST3 instruments. In the Track menu, select Load instrument plugin for the selected sequencer track; Use built-in instrument removes the binding. Assignment also selects the track for live MIDI. Live MIDI to selected instrument changes that target; Live MIDI to built-in sine restores the legacy live source. MIDI clip notes always go to their own track's instrument. Independent instances feed track gain/pan, mute/solo, bus routing and automation. Bindings/live target save in v12.
Supply the actual trusted Linux binary (including the inner .so of a VST3 bundle). Supported instruments have zero audio inputs, one mono output, float32 processing, zero latency and one note/event input. Default configuration only: no custom editor, opaque state/preset restoration, modern parameter editing/automation, stereo/multichannel instruments or MIDI output. No arbitrary third-party instrument is qualified by the original ABI fixture tests.
CLAP accepts MIDI or native notes; VST2 uses MIDI events; VST3 uses IEventList note events. Live CC reaches CLAP MIDI/VST2; native CLAP/VST3 have no controller mapping (including sustain). Live MIDI goes to exactly one selected target. Seeks/loops retrigger notes crossing the destination with fresh envelopes; plugin oscillator/opaque DSP state cannot be reconstructed. Panic delivers all-off (VST3 held-key note-offs); plugin release tails may remain. Processing uses preallocated 256-frame chunks and 256 incoming events per instance/chunk; overflow or processing failure silences the block and schedules reset events. The existing 32 simultaneous scheduled-note and 4096 stored-note bounds remain. Do not unload/replace modules during playback; candidate plans are prepared off the callback and old instances are reclaimed on the control thread. Missing references remain inspectable without loading; failed GUI preparation retains the current project. Save a backup for applications limited to v11 or earlier.