Open Octave Project and lscp

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Alex
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Open Octave Project and lscp

Post by Alex » Sat Jul 04, 2009 10:12 am

As a quick heads up, i'm also involved in the Open Octave Project, which is an orchestral and film based attempt at bringing apps and tools together in linux audio land.
Chris and I have been extremely busy getting this project off the ground, including branching an app,and going to work on the workflow, specific to building a professional use programme base. Open Octave Midi is our purely midi editor and sequencer, and we intend this to be the orchestral and film writer's tool of choice for working with MIDI, in conjunction with Linuxsampler at the beating heart of our project.

Ihave a question at this point.

Anders, and Chris, both made clever scripts to "convert' lscp maps to RG, and Midnam formats.

In order to streamline midi maps across applications, and be able to freely interchange them, what sort of work is involved in coding the lscp format into an app, by default? Example is, a user builds his or her maps in Linuxsampler, and then can simply import them into Open Octave Midi, without any need for any sort of conversion process. And vice versa.

Lscp as a mapping format seems to be robust, and i'm wondering if we can promote it further, as a unified format by default for linux audio midi bank and patch mapping. (I'd certainly like to do this, at least)

Perhaps a simple app with gui, in which users can build their maps, and save them for general use in lscp format apps?

Opinions?

Alex.

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cuse
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Re: Open Octave Project and lscp

Post by cuse » Sat Jul 04, 2009 10:01 pm

Alex wrote:In order to streamline midi maps across applications, and be able to freely interchange them, what sort of work is involved in coding the lscp format into an app, by default? Example is, a user builds his or her maps in Linuxsampler, and then can simply import them into Open Octave Midi, without any need for any sort of conversion process. And vice versa.

Lscp as a mapping format seems to be robust, and i'm wondering if we can promote it further, as a unified format by default for linux audio midi bank and patch mapping. (I'd certainly like to do this, at least)
Well, you can re-use our LSCP parser. The LSCP grammar is written in Backus-Naur Form (BNF) in the file src/network/lscp.y and we use bison which generates a parser (lscp.y -> lscpparser.cpp) from this grammar source file, which is then compiled by the normal C++ compiler. If you just need MIDI map handling, then you could of course also write a parser manually, but if there are any plans that you might need more than just MIDI maps for your protocol, I definitely recommend you to use a parser generator like we did. It eases the ongoing development and extension of protocols A LOT!
Alex wrote: Perhaps a simple app with gui, in which users can build their maps, and save them for general use in lscp format apps?

Opinions?
Sounds like a good idea to me. But I guess like so often, there will be people argueing about details of existing protocols (let it be LSCP or whatever), mostly ending in own solutions.

Another thing I thought about for a while, and which I never actually started, was implementing a MIDI SysEx dump for LinuxSampler's whole sampler session. Many people use(d) this way to store their hardware synth settings in their songs. I'll certainly implement that one day, but the question is when. You know, there are soooo many other things to do as well. :-)

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Re: Open Octave Project and lscp

Post by ccherrett » Thu Jul 09, 2009 3:24 am

Alex,

So you want to eliminate the need for a midi map to Open Octave Midi?

I ask because I just know I will get stuck coding it :)
Christopher Cherrett
Founder of The Open Octave Project
http://www.openoctave.org

Alex
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Re: Open Octave Project and lscp

Post by Alex » Thu Jul 09, 2009 10:47 pm

ccherrett wrote:Alex,

So you want to eliminate the need for a midi map to Open Octave Midi?

I ask because I just know I will get stuck coding it :)
hehe, not exactly, Chris.

I asked for the feasability of using a common format for midi maps, so the user only needs to do it once, instead of all the hoops you jumped through translating formats from one to another. The user builds a common map in lscp format, in LS, OOM, or a standalone app, and any lscp format capable app can read it successfully.

I think a common linux midi format, like lscp, would be useful, and as we both know from recent experience, take a lot of donkey work out of the process.


:)

Alex.

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