Parsing MIDI Bytes

MIDI is a binary protocol. Each each message is encoded as a status byte followed by up to three data bytes. (Sysex messages can have any number of data bytes and use a stop byte instead.)

Note

To parse a single message you can use the class methods mido.Message.from_bytes() and mido.Message.from_hex() (new in 1.2).

Mido comes with a parser that turns MIDI bytes into messages. You can create a parser object, or call one of the utility functions:

>>> mido.parse([0x92, 0x10, 0x20])
Message('note_on', channel=2, note=16, velocity=32, time=0)

>>> mido.parse_all([0x92, 0x10, 0x20, 0x82, 0x10, 0x20])
[Message('note_on', channel=2, note=16, velocity=32, time=0),
 Message('note_off', channel=2, note=16, velocity=32, time=0)]

These functions are just shortcuts for the full Parser class. This is the parser used inside input ports to parse incoming messages. Here are a few examples of how it can be used:

>>> p = mido.Parser()
>>> p.feed([0x90, 0x10, 0x20])
>>> p.pending()
1
>>> p.get_message()
Message('note_on', channel=0, note=16, velocity=32, time=0)

>>> p.feed_byte(0x90)
>>> p.feed_byte(0x10)
>>> p.feed_byte(0x20)
>>> p.feed([0x80, 0x10, 0x20])
Message('note_on', channel=0, note=16, velocity=32, time=0)

feed() accepts any iterable that generates integers in 0..255. The parser will skip and stray status bytes or data bytes, so you can safely feed it random data and see what comes out the other end.

get_message() will return None if there are no messages ready to be gotten.

You can also fetch parsed messages out of the parser by iterating over it:

>>> p.feed([0x92, 0x10, 0x20, 0x82, 0x10, 0x20])
>>> for message in p:
...    print(message)
note_on channel=2 note=16 velocity=32 time=0
note_off channel=2 note=16 velocity=32 time=0

The messages are available in p.messages (a collections.deque).

For the full table of MIDI binary encoding, see: http://www.midi.org/techspecs/midimessages.php