< Back to IRCAM Forum

Microtonal MIDI player for OM

OpenMusic
#8

Hi psingleton,

This week I built a MacOS standalone app for OM playback, with microtonal support. I did it precisely because some of my students have been wanting to start learning OM but have run into the same issue you’re describing.

Admittedly, the one I made is not as fancy as R-udp player, since it doesn’t use fluidsynth~ but feel free to try it. You can download it from my website, at the very bottom of the page: https://www.felipe-tovar-henao.com/projects

It’s called miniOMsynth — Hope that works for you. Let me know.

1 Like
#9

Hi Felipe,

Thank you for this - I’m very grateful. I’ve downloaded your player and it seems to work so far - I’ll let you know how it goes.

All the best,

Phil

1 Like
#10

Hi psingleton,
why not use the Ableton Live Samplers, they can be adjusted with a “scale” option to generate microtonal sounds. Only thing is that you provide your own sound files for the Sampler (use the Zone option). This to avoid Max and more technical spaghetti…
All the best.
Paul

#11

Hi Felipe,

Thank you very much for miniOMsynth.

but there’s something about your collective, choose “can’t close toplevel patchers” in the [standalone] inspector…

best,

Jerome

#12

felipetovarhenao,
I tried the standalone version but I’m confused about the in- and outputs. Does it not work with midi input (fi. IAC-Driver)? I can only play with the mouse…

#13

Hi Paul,

You need to enable OSC communication between OM and miniOMsynth, by going to OpenMusic Preferences/MIDI and make sure the default score player is set to osc-scoreplayer. Once you do that, the playback should work.

Let me know if that works.

Best,

FTH

#14

Hi Jerome,

Thanks for trying out miniOMsynth. Why do you recommend changing that attribute in [standalone]? I did it simply to make it easier to close the app, but maybe there’s something I’m missing. Did you download the Max project to notice this?

Best,

FTH

#15

hi,

when this box is not ticked, you can close the patch window, at this moment, you can’t see the patch again, you have to restart the standalone, it’s not very practical.

best,

Jerome

#16

You’re right — I’ll have to change that for the next release. Thanks for the suggestion Jerome.

FTH

#17

Hi Felipe
Thanks for your miniOMsynth which I had just downloaded. I have changed my midi OM preferences to osc-scoreplayer with the default ports. When I set a score-object also to osc-player the following OM message appears:
ERROR: cannot resolve hostname “localhost”, service 3000: unknown-host.
(I use OM 6.17 under Mojave)

#18

Hi BUSEMARK304885,

Thank you for trying miniOMsynth and letting me know about this. I noticed this issue has come up before with other OM players (see this thread). A couple of things I’d recommend to narrow down what the problem is:

  1. Try updating OM to v6.18. I’m also using Mojave so this seems to be the only difference from what you specified.
  2. Making sure that the Force score player option is checked.
  3. Checking if the order in which you launch each application makes any difference in you machine.

Let me know if the problem still persists, and I’ll try to see what I can do.

Best,

FTH

#19

Hy Felipe

  1. I have updated to v6.18
  2. The osc scoreplayer option is checked in the MIDI-preferences as well as in the score object (a voice). You suggest Force score player - is that a typing error.
  3. I’ve tried both launching orders: miniOMsynth-OM and OM-miniOMsynth
    The problem still persists!
    Best
    Markus
#20

Hi Markus,

This is pretty strange. Just to clarify, I did mean Force score player — in OpenMusic Preferences/MIDI, right below Default score Player, you will see a checkbox that says Force score player. I suggest checking it because one of my students wasn’t getting playback until she did this. If this doesn’t seem to do anything, I will soon be releasing v1.1 of miniOMsynth which will include (with a few extra features) a MIDI input option, although, as you might imagine, is not as ideal as OSC for dynamic and accurate microtonal playback.

Just out of curiosity, how new/old is your machine?

Best,

FTH

#21

… Yes Felipe, strange indeed. Even after checking the Force box the problem persists.
Regarding my machine: MacBook Pro (Mid 2012), 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7).
So quite old, but it works fine with Max 8 and is updated to OM 6.18.
Looking forward to try your v1.1!
Best
Markus

#22

Hi Markus,

Sorry the issue still persists — miniOMsynth-v1.1 is now available on my github, which lets you use OM’s midi-player as well.

As you might know already, the problem with using midi-player in OM is that it’s very limited — the microtones are automatically routed through different MIDI channels (chan1 for 1/2 tones, chan2 for 1/8 tones, and chan3 for 1/4 tones) which means 1) you can’t really use channels as different instruments, and 2) 1/8 tones is the highest resolution you’ll be able to get.

There’s also some re-patching I need to do to optimize miniOMsynth for MIDI playback, but I hope it’s a workable solution for the time being.

Let me know,

FTH

#23

Hi there!

There is one good news: if you get this error, it means that you are set up correctly in OM and your MIDI notes are now indeed routed through OSC over UDP when they are played (instead of using the MIDI player).

The bad news is that the UPD layer apparently doesn’t work and I’m not sure you can do much about it. :frowning:

The call:

(comm:get-host-entry "localhost" :fields '(:address))

should resolve “localhost” to an IP address. In your case, probably not, and therefore the connection fails with the error you reported.

#24

ps. If this is just the translation of “localhost” that fails, you can maybe try the following:

(defun note-osc-events (pitch vel dur date chan)
  (let ((evt (make-instance 'oscevent 
                            :host "127.0.0.1" :port *osc-score-output*
                            :bundle (list "/om/note" pitch vel dur chan))))
    (setf (offset evt) date)
    (list evt)))

:point_up: this redefines note-osc-events with “127.0.0.1” as hostname, which in principle is equivalent to “localhost”.

#25

Hi Jean

Thanx for your reply. Is it maybe because Markus’ port is not opened for some restricted permission?

Just asking?

Best
k

#26

Yes, probably not the port (it’s about resolving the host). I’m not sure what. :thinking:

#27

Sorry yes i meant the host.
@Markus Check your network settings. Did you change your localhost to other than 127.0.0.1 ?