Spiano Homepage

Spiano project contains four applications: spiano, ssynth, ssyntha and splaymid.

Spiano is a simple MIDI keyboard for Linux and X Windows. The piano is played by clicking the mouse on the keys. It can be used as a replacement of a real MIDI keyboard, when it's enough to poke one key at a time. It can also visualize MIDI events from input.

Ssynth is a simple piano synthetizator using additive synthesis. It's not intented to be a realistic sounding or implement much MIDI features, but is has a special feature of each key being tunable with MIDI pitch bend events. You can practise tuning a piano with it, with spiano or a any MIDI keyboard with a pitch wheel.

Ssyntha is just like ssynth but for ALSA audio output (no alsa MIDI but RAW). Optionally pass ALSA PCM device with -D parameter.

Splaymid is a simple MIDI sequencer. It reads standard MIDI files and sends MIDI events to standard output.

Because these applications talk raw MIDI, they work together simply using pipes: "$ spiano | ssyntha" or: "$ splaymid song.mid | ssyntha"

All three can work together. Command "splaymid song.mid | spiano | ssyntha" does both visualization and playback.

Or, say, there is a MIDI keyboard connected to a device file /dev/midi1, then start ssynth like this: $ ssynth </dev/midi1. Or if your MIDI device has a serial port interface, you can do $ splaymid song.mid >/dev/ttyS0.

Current status

The work is (slowly) in progress. There's a preview version available from sf.net download page. Only source code is available currently, but it'll compile with just "make" on a normal Linux workstation.

Development snapshot of the sources can be found from the git repository git://spiano.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/spiano/spiano (read-only). The repository can also be browsed with spiano repository gitweb

spiano's features

• Written in C
• Small binary size
• 88 keys from A0 to C8 as in typical piano.
• Simple and efficient X UI without extra bells and whistles
• Key number display
• Key name display (English, German or French)
• Pitch bend events by moving the mouse up and down
• Sustain "pedal" (right mouse button)
• MIDI Channel and patch selection
• MIDI events are sent to stdout (no ALSA dependency)
• MIDI events from stdin are visualized and forwarded to stdout
• Should be portable to any POSIX compatible system with Xlib

features of ssynth and ssyntha

• Written in C
• Small binary size
• 88 keys from A0 to C8 as in typical piano.
• Reads raw MIDI from stdin
• ssynth: Outputs audio to /dev/dsp (OSS API)
• ssyntha: Outputs audio to ALSA
• Implements only key up/down, sustain pedal and pitch wheel events
• Pitch wheel tunes only the lastly pressed key until lifted up
• Additive synthesis with inharmonic overtones
• Mostly fixed point calculations
• FIXME: Doesn't sound very good

splaymid's features

• Written in C
• Small binary size
• Reads standard MIDI files (.mid)
• Writes raw MIDI to stdout

The Future

The feature sets of the applications will be kept at minimum. But I'll make fixes and extend the application family with new members. Some ideas: tuning GUI (says how many beats you are hearing, which keys are how much out of tune and so on). I'm also planning a new data format for these applications (both file and streaming).

Author

Lauri Kaila laurikaila at users.sourceforge.net

index.html 2011-12-9