Ziguencer

A MIDI sequencer written in Zig

Motivation

Hackable alternative to hardware sequencers

Ziguencer is a lightweight stand-alone pattern-based MIDI sequencer. It's meant to run on small devices such as Raspberry PI (as old as the first model B), to function as a cheap, light-weight alternative to more expensive hardware MIDI sequencers, such as the Squarp Hapax or the Toraiz Squid.

Since Ziguencer written in a relatively high-level language, and is open source, it is much more hackable than proprietary hardware sequencers. New features and bug fixes aren't dependent on firmware updates from the vendor.

Endavour in Zig

As a programmer spoiled with the luxury of garbage collectors, Ziguencer is also a great way for me to understand the low-level details of programming, with fewer footguns than C, and a couple of awesome features as a bonus. For instance Ziguencer already leverages:

• easy integration with cross-platform C libraries (PortMidi)
• compilation to another target platform (From Mac to ARM linux on Raspberry Pi)

Features

• Pattern-based sequencing (Ableton Live-like)
• Launchpad UI for viewing and editing

Future plans

• Support for LED display on Raspberry PI
• Integration with multiple MIDI devices

Usage

Prerequisites

The libraries portmidi and notcurses need to be installed and available.

Usually it's a matter of running brew install portmidi notcurses or similar on your platform.

Starting

First build the binary, specifying the target platform, eg Mac:

zig build -Dmac

The run it:

./zig-out/bin/ziguencer 

The program should you a list of available midi devices and exit.

You can then start the program specifying devices:

./zig-out/bin/ziguencer --out [device name/number] (--in [device name/number]) (--launchpad auto)

Example:

./zig-out/bin/ziguencer --out fluidsynth --launchpad auto

The --out parameter is mandatory.

Using

TODO