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Enhancing your MIDI devices with Perl

by oalders on 1/29/25, 2:59 PM with 40 comments

• by PaulDavisThe1st on 2/2/25, 1:24 AM

  There's some confusion at the end of TFA about latency.

  What TFA refers to as latency is the time required to inject a MIDI event/message received by RtMIDI into the perl async object - basically inter-thread wakeup. You certainly expect that to be very, very fast - it's what context switching on any multitasking/multithreaded system relies. "Fractions of a millisecond" is in the right ballpark, though on some systems "Tens of microseconds" would be more appropriate as a description.

  What "latency" normally means in the context of MIDI or audio is the delay between the user generating a MIDI event somehow and when the audio corresponding to that MIDI event (e.g. a note) is audible. This is typically measured in relatively small numbers of milliseconds (e.g. 1-30).

  These are not really connected in any meaningful sense.

• by grav on 2/2/25, 4:10 PM

  Couldn't get the code to run with Perl on Mac:

     $ plenv exec perl midi.pl
     Not enough arguments for main::pedal_notes at midi.pl line 107, near "$note)"
     BEGIN not safe after errors--compilation aborted at midi.pl line 150.
  

  I got something similar working in Supercollider though, which has a lot of tools for these sort of things, eg:

     MIDIIn.addFuncTo(\noteOn, ~myNoteOnHandler);

• by randmeerkat on 2/2/25, 4:36 AM

  People still use Perl?