“Live Jukebox” using MIDI to run MS Excell, (or word)

[SmokeDog]

Ok, First time poster and TOTAL MIDI rookie here. I will say I’m an engineer and have done a TON of CNC, PLC and other automation work but have never done anything at all with MIDI. (That's why I'm Here brothers and sisters!)

Here is what I want to do, (Someone tell me if I’m all wet with the concept of using MIDI to make it happen in the first place too!).

OK, Picture a band and sitting out front is one of those old diecast chrome Seeburg or Rock-ola remotes like they used to have at every booth at the local diner and most Bars too back in the 50s and 60s ,(Dating myself there, huh?)

The kind I want to use has a bank of 20 letter buttons – A to V on top of a bank of number buttons 1-10 on the bottom …When you press a letter button it energizes it’s bus and then when you press the number button it heats up it’s buss and you get a circuit at that matrix location. This gives you 200 combinations….so what, huh? (Although that’s the way the old vinyl juke boxes work)

Well, Let’s say we take a cheap midi keyboard off eBay and instead of running the contacts in the chrome art deco Booth Remote Unit to it’s built-in matrix we connect its contacts to thr contacts on the keyboard. A thru V and 1 thru 10 on the remote to the first 30 keys on the Keyboard. SOOOO,,,When you press say B-3 you get a Low C and a Bb above middle C,,,,So far no problem, right?

Well let’s say what I want that C+Bb to equal tune # 23 (B-3), which is say,,,,,,, My Sharana, by the Knack,,(Worst song I could think of right off)

So far, to me everything is as simple as it gets, I can make up the whole thing including the mountings and even a fake jukebox to put the whole thing in standing on my head, but now I'd like to go to MIDI-ville and that’s where I’m stumped.

What I want the Midi to do is to trigger a computer to run a macro and enter the words “My Sharona” on the screen when ever someone presses b-3 on a spread sheet (With the screen visible from the stage and then advance to the next cell and wait for the next selection from the next selection from the audience (Hopefully a little early motown or somthing like that)

So here's the $64,000 question. (Another tip off as to my age)

IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE with MIDI and how would I program it if it is ?

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Now, I’m sure someone out there is asking “What in hell dose this guy want anything like that for, Right?

We have over 300 songs on our song list (Yea, there’s lot’s of oldies in there too) and I think it would be just cool as hell for people to walk up and “Play the band” the same way they play the juke box,,,The audience would be making up the set lists on the spot as we would play the songs in the order they appear on the spread sheet,,, Just like it works with the “robotic DJ” machines that are screwed to the wall. (AKA I'Net juke box)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Steve 'da ol' SmokeDog in Cleveland where Rock-N-Roll was born!

BTW - Yall let me know if you are commin' into town and we can have a barstool jam session and tell a few lies and maybe even play a few tunes together! - First round is on me !!!

 

[ssscientist]

It must have taken you a loooooong time to type all that --- unless you're as good a typist as you probably are an engineer...

First of all, the answer to you question is yes, but not in the way you have it cooked up in your head.

You are correct that midi fits the bill as a control protocol, but you will need to search for some software - not Excel or Word - to call up what you're seeking. You won't need to modify the eBay keyboard, but you may need to write some software to adapt midi notes and 'continuous controllers' to do what you're looking for.

Midi has been around for 30 years now. It started as a simple way to layer two keyboards but has lasted so long because the originators were clever enough to add continuous controllers to the note protocol. I think they (the 'cc's as they're called) may be your key to getting what you envision because one midi stream carries note information for 16 channels and up to 127 continuous controller streams for each channel. There is one catch - midi is a 31.2 KILOHERTZ (not megahertz or gigahertz) protocol and as such needs to operate in a serial manner, but with the speed of modern computers it still seems fast enough.

If you have a midi instrument available, download "MidiOx" --- it a free midi utility --- and start to get to know the ins and outs of midi. If not, Google 'midi' or 'midi protocol' or something else with the word 'midi' in it and go from there. And don't worry, you'll soon find yourself on familliar ground because, at it's core, midi is a hexadecimal language.

I've got a bunch more tips and tricks and advice and 'avoid so-and-so' and 'use so-and-so' but I don't know how committed you are to getting this going, If you want to, PM (private messae) me and we can continue this that way...

 

[JTb]

You are correct that midi fits the bill as a control protocol, but you will need to search for some software - not Excel or Word - to call up what you're seeking. You won't need to modify the eBay keyboard, but you may need to write some software to adapt midi notes and 'continuous controllers' to do what you're looking for.

yea. Get hold of MIDI OX, hook up a keyboard or virtual keyboard to it, and you can see the kind of info that youl be dealing with. its pretty simple stuf. wat you need to do tho is have sumthing connecting to it, and dat will be the hard bit.

 

[SysExJohn]

Nice idea, but there are some issues with implementation.

The actual switches on the keyboard, typically these days, are tiny, printed circuit board mounted, encapsulated, compressible, rubber things.
None-too-easy to connect to I'd have thought. And, I suspect, if you do connect directly to them you may affect the way they interact with the microprocessor that scans them and generates the MIDI "note" messages. So good luck with that.

The keyboard itself, let's say something like an Edirol PCR-M30, 32 note keyboard, will generate two MIDI messages every time a note is played.
A "note on" 3 byte message when a key is pressed followed by a "note off" 3 byte message as the key is released. One byte of which is the note number.
There are 128 numbers available, from 0 to 127, with middle C being note number 60.

(the structure is as follows:
The first half of the first byte represents 'note on' and is number 9 or 1001 binary.
The second half is the MIDI channel the note's being sent on from 0 to 15 or 0000 to 1111 binary.
The second byte is the note number from 0 to 127 or 0000 0000 to 0111 1111 binary.
The third byte represents the force with which the note was "struck" (note velocity) and is 1 to 127, binary 0000 0001 to 0111 1111.
The note off message can either be another note on message with a note velocity of 0,
or a note off message which has, as its first half byte, the value 8 or binary 1000.
The other two bytes of the note off are as for note on.)

If the keyboard is connected, let's say via USB, to a computer, then these messages will arrive at the USB port then be made available to a program via a piece of firmware commonly known as a MIDI driver.
The piece of software you use to display your message retrieves the MIDI data from the driver.
I'm not aware that Word or Excel are capable of handling the input from a MIDI driver.
I'm guessing that you would have to write your own application to do what you want.

Additionally most controller keyboards, of the kind I've indicated, also have octave shift up/down buttons, so you'd need to deactivate those somehow.

You'd need to get your head around this sort of stuff in order to implement something suitable.
Just some random thoughts on the subject.

Regards,
John.

 

[ssscientist]

The actual switches on the keyboard, typically these days, are tiny, printed circuit board mounted, encapsulated, compressible, rubber things.None-too-easy to connect to I'd have thought. And, I suspect, if you do connect directly to them you may affect the way they interact with the microprocessor that scans them and generates the MIDI "note" messages. So good luck with that.

Let's start this all over.

You don't need modify any hardware you buy on ebay, and I already knew what you carefully ran down about the nuts and bolts of the midi protocol.

You need to approach this from a different direction taking MIDI out of the equation.

I recommend a simple programming session using Excel in combination with the new touchscreen technology found in Windows 8. What you're asking for is to have your bands song list available to the audience and let them pick the next selection, and you don't need to reinvent the wheel to do that.

For example, you could have a touchscreen Windows 8 laptop presented to the audience inside an old jukebox that you find and modify or build from scratch. Then an audience member could walk up to it and use the touchscreen to select the song they'd like to hear, for example 'My Sharona'. Then the next audience member could walk up and pick, say, an early Motown tune. Modern laptops all have an output for a second screen which you could position somewhere in view of the band so they could see what the audience would like to hear next.

Simple, no?

Let me know if this idea solves the