A couple of interesting things in a recent newsletter from the MIDI Association.
ShowMIDI is a cross-platform, open source tool for analysing MIDI traffic. It is in its infancy with plans (or at least aspirations) to add features but currently it shows a GUI with each detected MIDI device acting as a column, below which appear blocks representing types of MIDI message as a message is received. This remains visible for a couple of seconds. Changes to the same message type will update the block, e.g. pitchbend messages will update the value within a single pitchbend block. I haven’t tried it yet (been busy trying to compile) but it looks like it could be interesting. I have failed to compile on Zynthian. This seems to be an issue with the version of gcc compiler. I have successfully compiled on Bookworm and will test on a Bookworm based Zynthian when I get time. I was hoping it could be available on the desktop (VNC) view but maybe not until we migrate to 64-bit Bookworm.
Building a USB MIDI 2.0 Device is the first part of an article describing how to build MIDI 2.0 devices. It is quite technical but also seems to hold your hand to some degree, i.e. it looks quite well written. I am only at the start of the article but hope to learn much. I am not sure if you can read this without being a member of the MIDI Association but it is free to join as a community member.
[Update] The lovely gbevin, maintainer of ShowMIDI has been very responsive to issues reported and has already fixed the build scripts so that ShowMIDI will compile with the older versions of gcc that Debian Buster (and hence current Zynthian stable & testing) use. I have it running on my V5 stable branch.
[Edit] Unfortunately, this is not useful in Zynthian at this time due to this issue. ShowMIDI does not play nicely with JACK.