Clavier 0.1.3
Copyright (C) 1998 Simon Kågedal
An ALGORHYTHM Production
Hi,
This program is called Clavier. It is an X11 program using the GTK+ [1] toolkit that displays a piano keyboard on the screen, which you can play on using your mouse. It then generates MIDI messages and outputs those to whatever you might want. You can also use your computer keyboard as a piano keyboard, as common in tracker programs. Kind of like another program I made for ttys, midikb [2], but graphical.
Clavier can also act as a display for incoming MIDI messages using FIFOs.
Installing Clavier
Read the file INSTALL. But, mostly:
./configure
make
make install
Running Clavier
Type 'clavier'. This will start up a "dead" Clavier that will not output to anything. To have it do that, you have to start it up with an option "-o <filename>", where <filename> is the filename or device that you want to output to. Some examples:
# Output to midi port
clavier -o /dev/midi
# Output to /tmp/midififo
clavier -o /tmp/midififo
# Output to standard output
clavier -o -
# Output to RTSynth
clavier -o - | RTSynth
# A cute little one-octave clavier
clavier -s 60 -e 72
Clavier acting as slave
If you specify a file to clavier with --fifo=filename, it will create a FIFO (first in, first out) file and read MIDI input from that. It will display "note on" and "note off" messages on the keyboard. Using the package midid [3] you can play midifiles and watch them being played! Cool, eh? Just be sure to first start clavier (with --fifo=fifofile) and then midid, with a configuration file that tells it to output to the same file. Then use "midiplay".
Tell me if you find any midi files that look particullary cool. :)
You can also just read from standard input with "-f -". Examples:
# This starts a horizontal clavier that outputs to a vertical clavier clavier -o - | clavier -f - -d v
# This too
clavier -f /tmp/midififo -d v &
clavier -o /tmp/midififo
Another program that can be used as input for clavier is midikb.
Keyboard Input
To use the computer keyboard as an input, copy the file examples/noteinput as ~/.noteinput and then run clavier. For information about how you can customize this to suit your needs, read README.noteinput.
Please contact me about anything concerning clavier, I love feedback:
Simon Kågedal <simon@sdf.se> (On IRC as `BookerT')
Homepage: http://www.sdf.se/~simon/ clavier page: http://www.sdf.se/~simon/clavier/
[1] The GIMP ToolKit, http://www.gtk.org/ [2] http://www.sdf.se/~simon/midikb.html [3] http://www.umr.edu/~johns/projects/midid/