MidiComp

If you're a musician or audio engineer looking for a versatile program to manipulate SMF files, look no further than MidiComp. This software allows you to both read and write SMF files in 0 or format 1, as well as read and write its own plain text format. This means you can easily turn a SMF file into easily parseable text, edit it with any text editor, filter it through any script language, and "recompile" it back into a binary SMF file.

Originally based on mf2t/t2fm by Piet van Oostrum and others, MidiComp should build on any Linux system simply by typing "make" in the source directory. The software offers a range of useful command line arguments as well, including debug output to stderr, verbose output in columns with notes, compiling ASCII input into SMF, using absolute time instead of ticks, and folding sysex data at N columns.

Translating a SMF file to plain ASCII format is as easy as using the command "midicomp some.mid" to view the file as plain text, or "midicomp some.mid > some.asc" to create a text version. To translate a plain ASCII formatted file to SMF, simply use the command "midicomp -c some.asc some.mid" with both the input and output file names specified, or "midicomp -c some.mid < some.asc" to input from stdin with one argument.

If you need to filter your MIDI data before converting it to SMF, just use the pipe operator to pass the data through another program: "midicomp some.mid | somefilter | midicomp -c some2.mid". Overall, MidiComp offers a flexible and powerful solution for anyone working with SMF files.