New to Java, want to make an app which manipulates midi data

[jedbeetle]

Hello! I am a musician who wants to make a midi-based application. I took a class in my Master's program where I made a very neat little program using LISP. I would like to take this program and turn it into a usable app, possibly something I could put up on the android marketplace for free. To get started, I need to know how to turn entire midi files into lists of usable data (I think this would be an array of arrays - LISP was all about lists, so that's the terminology I know) so that I can manipulate them and then output a new midi file using the new data. I think I can tackle transferring the basic algorithms of the code to Java, but I have no idea how to even begin getting data from actual midi file. Can anyone help me?

I need to turn midi files of any type into a series of "Cope events". Each "event" has 5 variables:

1. is ontime in 1000s of a second
2. is midi note (60 = middle C)
3. is duration in 1000s of a second
4. is channel (1 through16)
5. is loudness (0 through127)

[DarrylBurke]

Take a look at the classes in the javax.sound.* package tree. You'll probably want to start with understanding MidiFileReader. It's an abstract class, but there's a private concrete implementation somewhere in (I think) the sun.com.media.* package tree.

This guide dates from Java 1.4 but AFAIK nothing much has changed in Java sound since then: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/pdf/programmer_guide.pdf

db

[jedbeetle]

Thank you.