So, about a month ago I got a second-hand microKORG from Ebay. Fiddling around with the preset patches, and creating new patches is great fun, even though I only know a few chords. Recently I plugged it in to my PC via my M-Audio Uno USB->MIDI interface, and soon was using Ableton Live to program drums in time with the microKORG’s arp.

I thought I’d experiment the music libraries available in python, and see if I could send notes to the synth via MIDI. Turns out that the M-Audio Uno is supported under Ubuntu, all you have to do is install the midisport-firmware package. With the help of pyrtmidi, a set of python wrappers around the C++ audio library rtmidi I was able to recieve MIDI signals in realtime from the microKORG, and send them in realtime also. With the help of this old midi file reader/writer library that I found posted to a python mailing list, I’ve made some progress in writing a simple MIDI file player that sends notes to the ‘KORG.