Open Source C MIDI Software

TiMidity++ is an open source MIDI to WAVE converter and player.

The Pure Data (short Pd) project on SourceForge unifies the extensions (or externals) written for the Pure Data Graphical Computer Music System written by Miller Puckette with contributions from many others.

Firmware loaders for M-Audio/Midiman USB MIDI and Audio devices

A real-time software synthesizer based on the SoundFont 2 specifications. It can be used for live audio synthesis of MIDI events or for rendering MIDI files to disk, using SoundFont instruments. It can also be embedded in other applications. This is not a application with a graphical user interface, however there are several GUI applications which utilize FluidSynth.

Bristol is synth emulation package for a diverse range of vintage synthesisers, electric pianos and organs. The application consists of a multithreaded audio synthesizer and a user interface called brighton.

PortMedia was created to develop and share cross-platform, open-source I/O libraries for digital media including MIDI, video, and audio. Only a few things were released under the PortMedia umbrella. These are now hosted by the github.com/Portmidi/ project, where you can find the lastest versions of PortMidi, portsmf (Standard MIDI File support and more), and see github.com/rbdannenberg/scorealign for MIDI and/or Audio score alignment.

A cross-platform patch editor for the E-MU Proteus 2000 sample-based synthesizer family. prodatum is free software.

A featureful SID-music creation tool (tracker) for the Commodore 64. It includes many advanced effects and tools like keyboard-tracking, tempo-programs/funktempo, gateoff-table-pointers, filter-shift, SID-export, executable-export, MIDI/XM conversion and MIDI-input hardware, etc., etc. NOTE: I left SourceForge for reasons not ethical to mention here. You can find me and my further work at these locations: http://hermit.sidrip.com http://csdb.dk/scener/?id=18806 https://github.com/hermitsoft/

Basic structure for Android development

DSSI is an audio plugin API for software instruments (soft synths) and effects. It is based on the LADSPA plugin API, the ALSA sequencer event types, and OSC (Open Sound Control) communications with custom GUIs.

The No Budget Orchestra Plugins are a collection of virtual (software) musical instruments. comprising a full, classical orchestra There are flute, piccolo, oboe, bassoon, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, contrabass, trumpet, trombone, tuba, french horn, and various percussion sections. The various sections include articulations. For example, the violin section can play legato, pizzicato, staccato, and tremulo. There are subgroups as well, for example Violins I and II. The plugins are in LV2 (Linux) format for use in Ardour, Muse, QTractoor, etc. They are available in 2 formats; a collection of LV2 plugins, and a collection of linux executables. The plugins can be loaded into a host program such as Ardour, Muse, QTractor, etc. The executables are standalone versions that contain both the samples, and the engine that plays them.

BackupBand is a music auto-arranger. It has a virtual drummer, bassist, and rhythm guitarist. These 3 "musicians" follow your chord changes live (as you play some MIDI instrument, such as a keyboard) and they play along with you in perfect time. It's like having a live rhythm section backing you up. The rhythm section knows how to play in 60 different styles such as Rock, Disco, HipHop, Heavy Metal, Reggae, Swing, various latin styles, etc. You can also create your own styles for them to play. The bassist plays a rickenbacker, fender precision, synth, and double (acoustic) bass. The guitarist plays a les paul, steel string, and nylon string. The drummer plays 6 kits. You can also create your own multi-sampled guitars, basses, and kits for them to play.

Gmorgan is a midi processor. It can be voiced using Linux synths, midi connected equipment, or a soundcard. It is best to use a velocity sensing midi keyboard so that the first 4 voices can be mixed or layered. Demo at Youtube: http://youtu.be/3uIRq6M1tCs For GNU/Linux users, the latest file is .79. GMorgan .79 runs well on Ubuntu and most Linux/GNU distributions. Although it is included in the tarball, you can download .75 pdf documentation from the files section here. This revision incorporates a new drum pattern panel based on the FLTK spreadsheet example. There is also some miscellaneous cleanup. If you have tried it before, be sure to go to Settings->global, renew the file paths to the current gmorgan directory, and save them. The sound file has been slightly reformated, so results could be unpredictable if you don't do this. Try the play along at http://www.seconnecticut.com/GmorganPlayalong.htm

ABC is a text-based music notation language. This project aims to promote the ABC music notation language by providing cross-platform, open-source tools for manipulating, displaying and playing (via MIDI) ABC files. This project is here for historic reasons and there is not too much activity now. The abcmidi project is updated more frequently.

jack-keyboard is a virtual MIDI keyboard - a program that allows you to send JACK MIDI events (play ;-) using your PC keyboard. It's BSD-licensed. User interface is GTK-based.

Curses Jack connection manager, based on naconnect by Nedko Arnaudov

Jack-smf-utils is a set of two utilities - jack-smf-player and jack-smf-recorder - whose purpose is to play and record MIDI streams from/to Standard MIDI Files (i.e. the files with .mid extension) using JACK MIDI. It uses libsmf as a backend.

LibSMF is a BSD-licensed C library for handling SMF ("*.mid") files. It transparently handles conversions between time and pulses, tempo map handling etc. The only dependencies are C compiler and glib. Full API documentation and examples are included. Note that the development has moved to https://github.com/nilsgey/libsmf.

A SoundFont editor and other software for editing, managing and sharing sample based MIDI instrument files for computer music composition. Support for other formats is planned.

Advanced GTK+ Sequencer is intended to use for music composition. It features a piano roll, as well a synth, matrix editor, drum machine, soundfont2 player, mixer and an output panel. It's designed to be highly configurable, you may add effects to its effect chain, add or remove audio channels/pads. You may set up a fully functional network of engines, therefore exists a link editor for linking audio lines. In conjunction with ags you need a realtime kernel and alsa support. `ags` uses conditional locks to keep several threads in sync that's why you need at least a preemptible kernel.

WildMidi is a midi processing library and a midi player using the gus patch set.

TiMidity++ Windows Synthesizer (TWSYNTH) extended TiMidity++ to read midi inputs. CAUTION !! TWSYNTH proj. is obsolute. TWSYNTH sources are sucessfully included Timidity++. see http://sourceforge.net/projects/timidity

Linux driver for the Prodikeys PC-MIDI USB keyboard. The PC-MIDI is a combination Qwerty/Multimedia/Musical Keyboard.

Linux userspace driver to provide ALSA MIDI interface for Dream Cheeky/Dream Link USB Piano

Playmidi is a web and curses and SDL-based MIDI file player for Linux and MacOS and Chrome (via Web MIDI and Web Audio apis). All recent development has moved to https://github.com/nlaredo/playmidi It supports software rendering of midi files via SDL audio and can also output midi events to external midi devices (in time with SDL audio soft synth) via both alsa sequencer api (linux) and coremidi api (osx). Math-based synthesis (when no sf2 is loaded and no external midi output is set) is planned to evolve over time to support most of the features found in a minimoog voyager, and wavetable based sf2 support is expected to evolve to properly emulate all the features of a roland sc88 (but not there yet). Not all sf2 files are yet fully supported, but currently most development in the git tree has happened with one you can find via google search called Scc1t2.sf2. It provides a good starting point for those without external midi hardware