Using Palm with Midi

[Davidmarks]

I am using a Palm M130 to drive a MIdio 128 board which in turn is driving the solenoids of a street/fairground organ. I gather a number of people are interest in using Palms so if it is of any help here is what i have done. The only suitable software I have been able to find is ITTY Midi. This is a basic midi player which can be downloaded from the states They have a free trial version that you can download free to try which I seem to remember is fuklly functional but limited to a few seconds playing time) The full version was about 17GBP which I thought was pretty good. The ITTY site also sell cables and kits for getting full polyphonic midi out of the Palm - they also have a comprehensive compatibility list which tells you which Palm models you can use ( I bought a cheap black & white one for 4GBP on ebay. It only has 2mb but will operate midi OK.)

To get Midi out from the Palm you have to first of all make sure you have a serial cable (or cradle) USB will not do.

It is possible to make up a cable which connects the serial D plug to a five pin midi plug. The wiring is simple. There are only two wires and you need to add a 220ohm resistor and a diode which can be buried in the D socket. I can't remember offhand where on the Web I found the details of how to make it but if anyone is stuck I will dig around and try to locate it again. Hope someone finds this helpful.

Cheers all

[stryd_one]

Thanks David :)

[DrBunsen]

There's also MiniMusic's suite - pretty cheap too.  The difference being, where Itty is only a player, Minimusic is a full sequencer.  That's right, compose/jam on a Palm. /edit/ four voices plus drums only though, last time I looked.

And somewhere on this forum someone is using I've previously suggested a Palm as an emulated Matrix Orbital LCD for MIDIbox.

[fluke]

I haven't tried it, but this page has a circuit for a Palm/MIDI adapter and a simple example program for using it in Basic.  Palms (at least the 68k based ones, i don't know about the ARM based ones) can do serial at 31250 baud, so only the voltages have to be adapted.

http://www.physicalbits.com/Pilot/PilotMidi.htm

[adamjking]

Do Palm pilots support Java applications? I've recently started learning J2ME (Java for mobile devices) and some time in the distant future there is the possibility I might start writing small MIDI apps for  mobile devices.

Any suggestions on what might be a useful MIDI applications for use with mobile devices?

- Adam

[fluke]

The newer ARM based Palm devices do support J2ME (Sun did write a MIDP 1.0 JVM for 68k based Palms, but it only supports PalmOS 3.5 and is rather slow).  A drum machine would be a useful application for J2ME.  Probably only as a metronome, the drums on my phone sound horrible and i think they must have only 3 samples for the entire midi drum range. :)

[DrBunsen]

The problem is, the newer the Palm the less likely it will have a serial connection rather than USB.

[stryd_one]

It's EVIL I tell you, USB is like a big nasty hardware virus. yuk! .... It's the Terminator of the serial busses, it's going to go self-aware and nuke us all ;)