Automated Generating Of Sound Files for Individual Music Notes on a Mac

Question

I have a specific task I want to accomplish...I am trying to figure out if there is an a way of doing this. Basically, for a project I am working on, I want to create sound files for individual music notes.

So, for example, a piano playing a single "A" sound would be one file. A piano playing a "B" sound would be another file.

I would like to do this for a large number of instruments. I know that Mac OS has midi instruments built-in. I been able to create the sorts of files I am looking for by hand in Garage Band by playing a software instrument, saving the file, then altering the pitch.

This is time-consuming, however, and I think the process could be automated. Maybe if I could create a midi file with the command line and then convert that midi file to a sound file, I could do it with a shell script?

Does anybody have any recommendations to put me on the right track?

Answer 1

The solution that I used involved abc2midi and Amadeus Pro, although it seems I could have used FluidSynth if I wanted to go full command line. Basically, I made a template abc file that looked like this

X:1
M:4/4
K:C
%%MIDI program number
note z

then I replaced "number" and "note" with a shell script that looked like this

#/bin/sh

for i in {0..127}
do
    for j in C ^C D ^D E F ^F G ^F A ^A B c ^c d ^d e f ^f g ^g a ^a b c\'
    do
        sed "s/number/$i/g" template | sed "s/note/$j/g" > $i$j.abc
    done
done

for file in *.abc
do
    abc2midi $file
done

At that point, this basically gave me a folder full of midi files that I could then use a synthesizer to turn into wav files. Here, I batch processed them with Amadeus Pro (which is a commercial application).

I understand that a command line synthesizer like FluidSynth might have also worked, but this was only one (small) step in my project and I was trying to do this in the fastest way possible, not make the most elegant solution, so I didn't take the time to get that running and add it to my shell script.