eMDee Musical Director's Assistant

eMDee is a live performance and rehearsal assistant for musical directors which removes the need to have folders of tracks and command-line windows open in order to play backing tracks for performance groups such as singers, choirs, and theatre-groups.

The MD can plan in advance the order of performance; later, eMDee will facilitate the playing of each track in the specfied order during the performance.

eMDee was originally designed for GNU Linux systems such as Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, etc., it now also runs under Windows.

• eMDee Musical Director's Assistant
  • Core Features
  • Session Editing
  • Prerequisites
    • GNU/Linux
    • Windows
  • Installation
    • Install Executable
      • GNU/Linux
      • Windows
    • Build from Source
      • From the Alire Crate Repository
      • From Source Download
  • Changes

Core Features

• Create 'session' of 'tracks'
• Tracks may be audio (FLAC, MP3, OGG, WAV) or MIDI files (played externally)
• Tracks may be re-ordered
• Tracks may be marked for skipping in performance
• Controls are provided to Play, Stop
• Audio tracks may have a volume modified
• Dummy or 'placeholder' tracks may be inserted to remind MD of a cappella pieces etc.
• Independently scalable interface, so you can have a nice big font for live use without reconfiguring your desktop

Third-party 'helper' applications are used to actually play the tracks, currently...

• ffplay for FLAC, MP3, OGG and WAV
• aplaymidi (Linux) or playsmf (Windows) for MIDI files on an external device such as a synthesizer, keyboard, organ, or digital piano

You must ensure those applications are installed on your system for eMDee to work, see below.

When a MIDI file is manually stopped from playing, an all-notes-off MIDI file is sent to the player to prevent stuck notes.

Session Editing

Prerequisites

eMDee relies on well-known third-party applications to play audio and MIDI files, these must be installed for eMDee to function.

GNU/Linux

1. ffplay is part of the ffmpeg package on most systems derived from Debian (eg. Mint, Ubuntu). It should be installed via your usual package manager.
2. aplaymidi is part of the alsa-utils package on most systems derived from Debian (eg. Mint, Ubuntu). It should be installed via your usual package manager.

Windows

1. ffplay is a part of the ffmpeg package. A Windows binary is available at https://www.gyan.dev/ffmpeg/builds/#release-builds, you only need the essentials build for eMDee. If you are unsure how to install, see https://www.wikihow.com/Install-FFmpeg-on-Windows.
2. playsmf is part of "Div's MIDI Utilities" available here: http://public.sreal.com/~div/midi-utilities/.

You will neeed to ensure that both of these players are on your PATH so that eMDee can find them. There are clear instructions in the above FFmpeg installation guide on how to do this, follow the same steps for playsmf.

Installation

Install Executable

GNU/Linux

An AppImage file will normally be provided with each release. Install it in the usual manner.

Windows

TODO

Build from Source

eMDee is written in Ada and built using the modern Alire source-based package manager. This is easy to install under Linux or Windows and handles the entire build-chain for you. See https://alire.ada.dev/docs/ for how to install Alire on your system.

From the Alire Crate Repository

[Not yet published]

Once Alire is installed, the following command will download and build eMDee and its internal dependencies in one step...

alr get --build emdee

From Source Download

Download and extract the latest release source code bundle from https://github.com/SMerrony/emdee/releases

In the newly-created directory run alr build. The first time you do this it may take some minutes whilst all the required libraries are downloaded and built, subsequent builds will be very fast.

The executable will be found in the bin subdirectory.

Changes

• 0.2.0 Add button to delete sound file from a track - Issue #2
• 0.1.1 Fix adding new tracks with no associated sound file - Issue #1
• 0.1.0 Initial release - runs OK on GNU/Linux and Windows