MIDI Device Protocol

Useful Links

• The Sparkfun MIDI Tutorial 💾

  Sparkfun's MIDI Tutorial is fantastic, and likely has most if not all of the information you would need to go from no knowledge what so ever on the topic to communicating directly with MIDI devices with your trusty arduino and some sketchy soldering.

• The RtMidi Library

  RtMidi is a C++ library which provides a common interface for accessing MIDI devices using a variety of audio backends on Mac, Windows, and Linux. This does not provide much abstraction over the MIDI protocol itself, so take some time to scan through the Sparkfun Tutorial first if you are unfamiliar with it.

• Wikipedia's UART Page

  MIDI devices use UART for the actual hardware interface. The article's explanation of UART data framing is useful if you plan on bit banging your UART.

• UART For FPGA

  This project is a simple implementation of UART in VHDL, and is suitable for communicating with MIDI devices.

• VHDL MIDI Packet Classifier

  Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm doing. But, I put together a VHDL thing that sits on top of the previously mentioned VHDL UART thing, and my thing takes the incoming bits and bops and spits out nice neatly organized signals that would be useful for building an instrument out of.

Scans From my Notebook

For the brave, here are some pages from my notebook that outline the basic anatomy of a MIDI packet.