Hi,

Feel free to tell me where to read, I am new and struggling to figure out where to go.

So, my interest in using pd is to process midi data that I will be producing by some app. I have a virtual port and pd is receiving data just fine. I see numbers flash in the "left output" of the midiin object.

As a first step I am interested in simply "gathering up" all the raw bytes and dumping them to a text file *along with the midi timestamps* so I can see exactly what is going on

What I am interested in down the road is the ability to process SOME of the data that I receive, change it to something else, and then spit it all back out to my sound module (using the output port), but I, of course, need to learn how to preserve all the start times on all channels correctly, so that the performance sounds right.

As I said, feel free to tell me to RTFM, just tell me where, because midi-help.pd is not helping me very much.

Thanks.

read the helpfile on [qlist], that's a good point to jump into tfm.

Thanks, sunji.

What is tfm - text file management, or something?
[EDIT: doh, I myself said RTFM - ok, nevermind]
So, I am trying to work through that qlist-help.pd file.

One problem I ran into:
I generate a bunch of "messages" with [add 500 this is another...(.
I can print them and bang them, but I can't seem to "write them" to a file.
I get:
error: /tmp/qlist.txt: write failed
Is it some windows thing? (I have tried to use quotes, double up the //, nothing helps. I was even shocked to discover that if I try to type in a backslash, I get this weird "keycode 92: dropped" message, whatever that means).

The other problem I am having with pd help, is when I try to get help on any message, I get a generic help file message-help.pd, which tells me nothing about the specific of the "write message".

Another thing that I am confused by is that qlist-help.pd mentions "qlist.q" and I don't see that used anywhere.

Thanks.

qlist.q is a typo. Should be qlist.txt.

Each message is specific to the object, so if you want a help on formatting a message or whatever, you need to look at the help file for the object you are sending the message to.

As for the backslashes, those are reserved characters in Pd, so you can't use them.

My Windows machine is fried, so I can't test this myself. But on UNIX systems, starting a path with / means it's an absolute path. But Windows is not UNIX. If you're trying a relative path, try getting rid of the first /. If it's absolute, try starting with C:/ or whatever your drive name is.

Ok, I sort of suspected it might have been a typo, but as a noob, you try to be careful with your assumptions...

Yeah, I tried it all, [write test.txt(, or [write c:/test.txt(, nothing works, always the error:

I actually found this: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=478070&aid=2947346&group_id=55736

Funnily enough, if that "clear" message is used like it says, indeed, I do get a blank file, even though an error is printed in the console.

Could it be a bug?

In any case, it looks like I should learn about dumping things in memory (in a form of an array or something), rather than a file, if I want to process my midi data on the fly (which is what I am ultimately interested in).

But I would still like to get to the bottom of not being able to write a file, since this seems like an important kind of issue.