CLI tool for routing MIDI messages between devices, based on midir. I wrote
this to help me control some of my music gear while learning Rust.
- MIDI port enumeration
- MIDI routing
Assuming you get the names of the ports right (do a midi-tool list
first), midi-tool route will start forwarding all MIDI events from one
port to the other. Play some notes on the source MIDI device and
hopefully the target device makes noises!
Compile with cargo build --release and run the binary from the target.
midi-tool listShows all available MIDI input/output ports.
midi-tool route --source-name "MIDI Controller" --target-name "Synth"Forwards MIDI data between two devices.
Tip: If your port names have spaces, wrap them in quotes.
I plan on following up with additional MIDI features that I think of as I use this when producing and jamming, maybe come up with a little swiss knife type thing. Other than that, a few enhancements that I am considering at the moment - keeping in mind this is a learning project:
-
An interactive mode, with maybe a ncurses-based TUI (do people still use that these days?) where you can just navigate with the keyboard to create routings.
-
Multithreading so the same process can forward multiple active routes in parallel.
-
OS-native frontends for MacOS and Linux (Ghostty-style)
The CLI uses clap, which from what I could gather is a fairly standard
crate. Unsurprisingly so, since at least at the level of complexity we
have here the #[derive(Parser)] directive is a joy to use.
The MIDI stuff uses midir. In fact, the route subcommand is
basically a reimplementation of the test_forward.rs example bundled
with that crate. I worked up to parity using it as a reference while
navigating the foreignness of the language.
And on that note, rustlings was an invaluable resource to get up to speed.
This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for full details.
Copyright 2025, Nuno Correia (@noon-ng on GitHub)