ShowMIDI is a multi-platform GUI application to effortlessly visualize MIDI activity.
All the heavy lifting is done by the wonderful JUCE library.
The project website is https://github.com/gbevin/ShowMIDI
Join the Forums: https://forum.uwyn.com
Chat on Discord: https://discord.gg/TgsCnwqWTf
This application fills a void in the available MIDI monitoring solutions.
Instead of wading through logs of MIDI messages to correlate relevant ones and identify what is happening, ShowMIDI visualizes the current activity and hides what you don't care about anymore. It provides you with a real-time glanceable view of all MIDI activity on your computer.
This animation shows the difference between a traditional MIDI monitor on the left and ShowMIDI on the right:
Here's a tutorial video that shows you a quick overview of why I created ShowMIDI:
You can download pre-built binaries from the release section: https://github.com/gbevin/ShowMIDI/releases
Since ShowMIDI is free and open-source, you can also easily build it yourself. Just take a look into the Builds directory when you download the sources.
If you're using the macOS Homebrew package manager, you can install ShowMIDI with:
brew install gbevin/tools/showmidi
To use it, simply double-click the application to launch it.
To pause the MIDI data stream, press the spacebar, to un-pause, press it again.
The plugin versions can be used in any DAW that supports MIDI effect plugins. Some plugin formats, like VST3, might filter out certain MIDI messages and not present a fully accurate view.
ShowMIDI ships with a handful of themes, more will be added in the future.
You can edit, create and save them yourself in the application. Feel free to submit your themes to me.
You can find the included themes in the repository, please make sure to download the raw SVG files, otherwise the download might not contain the right information. Here are direct links to some of the included themes:
ShowMIDI was created by Geert Bevin: https://uwyn.com
The UI design was done by Stephen Petoniak: https://spetoniak.com
ShowMIDI relies on Git submodules for compilation of external dependencies.
After cloning the repository, make sure to update and initialize all the Git submodules:
git submodule update --init --recursive
To build ShowMIDI on Linux you need a minimal set of packages installed beforehand, on Ubuntu this can be done with:
sudo apt install build-essential pkg-config libasound2-dev \
libfreetype6-dev libx11-dev libxrandr-dev \
libxinerama-dev libxcursor-dev
You'll also need to find a version of the VST2 SDK and put it in a location that the compiler can find.
Searching online for vst2.x/aeffect.h should give you some options for download.
Sadly it's not allowed to distribute this SDK, so it has not been included.
The folder of the VST2 SDK should be placed at libs/vst2 in the source repository.
After that, go to the LinuxMakefile directory
cd Builds/LinuxMakefile
and build the binary by typing make
make CONFIG=Release
The resulting binary will be in the Build/LinuxMakefile/build directory and can be moved anywhere appropriate on your system, for instance into /usr/local/bin:
sudo mv build/ShowMIDI /usr/local/bin
