How do I get my teeth into iPhone MIDI

Question

Sorry, this is a really basic question.

Say I want to press buttons on my iPad, and have fruity loops ( on my MacBook ) play 'twinkle twinkle Little Star'

How do I do this?

• What code to use? Could someone give an example?
• how do I set it up? Do I need to configure anything On the iPad, on OSX, in fruity loops?
• can I use the USB cable? Can I use anything else? Bluetooth?

And how about if I want to send MIDI to another device? how can I do that? BlueTooth?

Answer 1

As far as MIDI on the device, you should look at the iOS 4.2 support for Core MIDI. The reference documentation hasn't cleared NDA yet, but you could look at this article by Pete Goodliffe for more on using the framework in an iOS application.

I've never used Fruity Loops before, so I can't comment on that application. I have no idea how you'd interact with it other than through AppleScript.

In general, if you want to communicate between an iOS device and the desktop, you'd use Bonjour discovery and a Mac client application to establish a connection between the two via a WiFi network. It's up to you to set up the communication protocol and what is being transferred between the iOS and Mac applications. You could theoretically have the Mac application either play the MIDI file or somehow trigger Fruity Loops to do so (again, I'm not sure if this application would support that).

I show an example of this Bonjour discovery and Mac-iOS communication in my class on iTunes U, for which the course notes (including links to sample applications) can be found here.