Music Producers should now know how to code

Tuesday 29 July 2014

I received a texto from my brother @Yoann_Saunier asking me if I knew about Java. He is a music producer, from the duet Faggy Dux so I found it quite weird.

Turns out that he is working on composing the music of a French TV series in Logic Pro X and needed a way to reproduce the midi signal of channel 1 to all the other channels from 2 to 16. And Logic Pro gently gave him a text editor to write code in!

It’s not really Java, it’s JavaScript, but I can’t blame him for making the mistake. Here is the code we pair programmed:

/*
With Scripter, you can use JavaScript to create your own custom MIDI processing
effects, including slider controls for real-time interaction.

For detailed information about about using Scripter, including code samples,
see the MIDI plug-ins chapter of the Logic Pro X Instruments or
MainStage 3 Instruments manual.
*/

// This code will replicate all ControlChange events (modulation, etc.) read
// on channel 1 to all the channels from 2 to 15.
function HandleMIDI(event)
{
    if (event instanceof ControlChange && event.channel == 1) {
        for (var i=2; i<=16; i++)
        {
            var cc = new ControlChange;
            cc.channel = i;
            cc.number = event.number;
            cc.value = event.value;
            cc.trace();
            cc.send();
        }
    }
    event.trace();
    event.send();
}

For programmers, this is quite straigthforward, but for my brother, it was like the graal. He told me that he lost 3 hours on the Internet searching if someone had already done this, and just found a guy selling a bunch of scripts for 40 bucks. Well, I guess musicians will need their stackoverflow quite soon.

Would you like to learn programming? I am CTO of Le Wagon, a 9-week full-stack web development bootcamp for entrepreneurs, and would be happy to have you on board!

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