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110 lines
6.9 KiB
Plaintext
110 lines
6.9 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 991
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Title: HPR0991: Making a Music Sampler with Midi and Pygame
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0991/hpr0991.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-17 17:03:18
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---
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Hello, this is BeGraderClock and welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
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Today we're going to be talking about PiGame, the MIDI modules that are contained in PiGame,
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and how you can use those to make a very cool, inexpensive sampler out of a netbook.
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I first learned about PiGame at the South East Linux Fest.
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I was watching a presentation by Ryan Ikelis-Cordan about how easy it is to make games in Linux
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using Python and how hard it is to do it, you know, in Windows, where you would have to
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type in a ton of code in Windows just to get the little screen to update correctly, and
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in Linux it was just like two lines.
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I never really been that much of a gamer, just had a curiosity.
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I was looking through the PiGame website, and I looked on the documentation link and
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low and behold, there was some stuff on there about MIDI.
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MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface.
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MIDI is very, very nerdy, and it's usually associated with keyboards and lots and lots
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of cables, but some musicians use MIDI and live performances and makes the little less
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nerdy.
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Bands like Pick Face and KMFDM can mix electronic instruments and samples with live instruments
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on stage, and it comes across as very powerful, not like karaoke, like you're singing along
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to a tape.
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Everything seems very live, and cohesive, and full of energy, and I've always been really
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interested in that stuff and try to use electronics in live performances as I play drums, and
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I was always put off by how expensive equipment is for electronic music.
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If you want to buy a sampler, which is the little box that plays snippets of audio,
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like if you want to play a silly little quote from a Clint Eastwood movie, or something
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like that, something tough like that.
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You'd have to pay hundreds of dollars for that, and the gear isn't very versatile.
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It only holds so much information, you can only play the samples in certain ways, and
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it's always been a problem.
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But seeing the MIDI modules in the pie game program, I started thinking like, hey, maybe
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I can just build a sampler.
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If I can figure out how to use MIDI, I'm going to hook it up to maybe an old netbook.
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Maybe I can build my own sampler for cheap.
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So I kept looking around the pie game site, found their mailing list, hopped on it, asked
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a couple dumb questions, got a bunch of very nice replies, and made it happen.
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And if I can make it happen with my terrible programming skills, definitely you can make
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it happen.
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Before you start, you want to make sure you have pie game version 1.9.1, or better installed
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on your system.
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Older versions of pie game did not have the features to use MIDI.
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Pie game is also a cross-platform.
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It runs on macOS and Linux and Windows.
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But for what we want to use it for, an old netbook, Linux was the obvious choice.
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But if you're in the pain and you want to use Windows or something else, go for it.
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So to build this sampler out of pie game in MIDI, I needed to learn how to use Python.
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To learn Python, I just did a couple YouTube tutorials to print out hello world to the
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screen, learn how to do an if statement and a for loop, which is pretty easy in Python.
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If you've had any kind of a programming class, even if there's something like a web programming
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class, I'm sure you can do this.
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So I wrote a couple little Python test scripts, and I tried to incorporate some of the information
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that was on the pie game documentation website, which didn't go as planned.
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So I put a question on the pie game mailing list, and a guy named Leonard Lindstrom wrote
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back and said, hey, just take a look at the midei.py file under the pie game examples folder.
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And basically all that I wanted to do was already spelled out in that file.
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All I needed to do was kind of copy and paste some things and move it around.
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And it worked like a charm.
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If you open up a terminal and go to the folder where the midei-py file is and type in python
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midei.py space dash dash input and hit enter, it will list all the MIDI devices plugged
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up to the computer at that point.
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If you follow those same steps, and then after the dash dash input, put the number of the
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device in the list that showed previously, the Python script will read all the events
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coming out of the midei device.
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Right now I have my keyboard hooked up to my computer.
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I'm running that midei.py script, and if I press the middle C key, the white key on the
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keyboard, it prints a string of information to the terminal.
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One of the items in the comma delimited string is data 1, and it returns 60.
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And now if I press the black key just above the original key I pressed, it returns the
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same information, but it says 61 now.
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So you can basically use the information that's being printed out to the screen inside
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the midei.py file and just kind of go in there and put some if statements that say if
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you see note 60, play a bass drum sample, and if you see 61, play a cleanyswood sample.
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And if you see 63, play this piano sample four times, since you're programming your own
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sample, you can do really neat stuff like using the random function in Python to say if
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I press this key, randomly play a middle C or a high C. So by just playing normal drums
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with a trigger hooked up to that middle C, it'll play a range of notes without you doing
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anything special.
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It's all just programmed in the little PyGames script.
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You can do if statements based on the information that's returned.
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You can say if I press this key, play a bass drum sound, and if I press this other key,
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play a snare sound, but first stop playing the bass drum sound.
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So you get this short cropped bass drum sound that's cut off by another sound, which
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can sound really neat, have one drum that rings out forever in another drum that quickly
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cuts the other one off.
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You can put together some pretty interesting stuff.
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Okay, this includes my little podcast about PyGame and MIDI.
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I'm going to add some Python examples in the show notes for using if statements to play
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sounds to get more information about PyGame and MIDI and PyGame.
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Check out the PyGame.org website and hop on the mailing list.
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Once again, that was p-y-g-a-m-e-dot-o-r-g.
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Thanks for listening.
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This has been BeGrader Clock.
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Peace out.
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