MIDI Scripting App For Windows 10 - Inspired By Us

Powershell and MIDI events takes advantage of the new MIDI API   12-Aug-15

You may have seen our excellent interview with Principal Program Manager at Microsoft Pete Brown - hes in charge (amongst other things) of evangelizing the new MIDI and Audio APIs that come as part of the Windows 10 update - its a good watch/listen.Anyhow, Pete is also a pretty capable programmer and has written some extensions for Powershell - to allow MIDI events to trigger commands - its a first.

He says that it was inspired by the way we use Applescript and MIDI in our setup here to help drive the technology behind the Sonic TALK podcast - its a weekly show with remote video guests, where we talk Music Tech.

Powershell is a is a task automation and configuration management framework from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language built on the .NET Framework.

Pete says: "With the release of Windows 10 and our new, modern, multi-client MIDI API, I thought it was time to build out something like this for Windows users. We don't have MIDI routing in Windows yet, but we do have PowerShell, which lets you do a fair bit of automation and other system-level hacking."

The script is available vi GitHub - its not an official Microsoft product but something Pete has been doing "out of hours"

"The code includes MIDI send, and basic MIDI receive (note on/off, plus continuous controller messages, and program change). The samples were written using a Novation LaunchPad, but are generic enough (with the exception of the text banner scrolling) to work on anything."

He goes on to say that its not designed for time-critical MIDI event handling, but will allow you to trigger system and application events based on MIDI input such as Note and Controller. It will also send basic MIDI messages to your designated devices.

Github project link