I am a musician and use Ableton Live to play MIDI songs. When I run a song, I would like the lyrics and written music to be displayed - I am looking for a way that a MIDI message could open, say, a TextEdit file. Or it could be a jpg, png etc… anything that I could save my lyrics and written music to.
I had this ability when I was using QMidi to run my songs, but prefer Ableton allows me to vary the length of the songs on the fly, which is great for playing live.
I am trying to find out if AppleScript could use a MIDI message to open a specific file that displayed the lyrics/music.
I’m also using a program called MidiPipe, which, if I understand correctly, can take AppleScript messages and turn them into MIDI messages.
If anybody has any ideas about how I might go about this I’d love to hear them.
OS 10.4.11/PowerMac G4 dual 1GHz/1.5GB RAM/Ableton Live 7.0.18/MidiPipe 1.4.3
Using a free app called MidiPipe, I made a pipe that consisted of a Midi In and a AppleScript Trigger. I made a sequence that had only a note on command in it and sent that to MidiPipe’s MIDI In. Then in the AppleScript Trigger box I pasted:
on runme (message)
say “I am not a Robot”
end runme
And when I run the Midi File on QMidi the computer speaks the line.
Next will be to program AppleScript to take a certain MIDI Control Change and have that call up a .txt file.
I have resigned myself to seemingly unavoidable task of inserting a track on Ableton that will call up the .txt file. Adding that track to Ableton will have to be done manually as Ableton uses a unique format and it’s beyond me to crack it.
If anybody could help with the AppleScript I need that would be fantastic!
Here’s what it might go like:
incoming MIDI message
take that 3 digit number and open the file that starts with that number in a certain folder on my Mac’s desktop
An example of the data for a Control Change (CC) MIDI message, on MidiPipe is “123 120 111”. The “111” is the variable that needs to turn into the first 3 digits of the .txt file.
