MIDI Monitor is intended to track outgoing and incoming MIDI streams. The application supports monitoring multiple MIDI sources and viewing their signals in different formats. Its interface is quite Spartan, still quite friendly. Luckily, the tool comes with a carefully written help document that will likely answer most of your questions.
Every time you start MIDI Monitor, a new document is opened for you. Fortunately, most of the operations are performed from a single window, which has three main sections: Sources, Filters and the panel in which the MIDI events are displayed. In this respect, the Sources and Filters sections appear collapsed by default and you can easily expand them by clicking on their respective arrows. Then, you can check the intended sources or filters. As you can see, there are three main filter categories: voice messages, system common and real time. In addition, there are other subfilters for each category.
As to the MIDI events, they are shown in chronological order. Likewise, you can check different types of data related to each event, including time, source, message, channel and data. It is also possible to set limits to the number of events on the list. It is good to know that the tool supports multiple formats, such as Note, Decimal and Hexadecimal. Regrettably, there is no way to preview the sounds as waveforms.
All in all, MIDI Monitor is most welcomed by those who are engaged in music production as it serves to solve various problems related to MIDI playback. Likewise, programmers may find it quite useful when trying the apps they are developing. Luckily, this product is open-source and free for everyone.
v1.3 [Sep 14, 2012]
- Fixed a bug: the "spying" driver wasn't being installed properly.
- Added "expert mode" to display some messages more accurately (but more confusingly).
- Added automatic updating via Sparkle.
- Built for 32- and 64-bit. No more messages about the MIDI Server having to restart in 32-bit mode.
- No longer works on PowerPC or 10.3 or 10.4, sorry. If necessary, get version 1.2.5, which does.
- Picked a better font for the long data views.
