Tools for Generating and Working with MIDI Files

Overview

atm-cli is a command line tool for generating and working with MIDI files. It was purpose-built for All the Music, LLC to assist in its mission to enable musicians to make all of their music without the fear of frivolous copyright lawsuits. All code is freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. If you're looking for a Rust library to generate and work with MIDI files, check out the libatm project, on which this tool relies. For more information on All the Music, check out allthemusic.info. For more detailed information about the code, check out the crate documentation here.

Choice of License

All datasets generated by All the Music, LLC have been released in the public domain, which means they are free for anyone to use for any purpose without restriction under copyright law. However, if we released the code into the public domain under CC0, we would have no control over entities using it with malicious intent. CC BY 4.0 allows us to assert that no one can place additional restrictions on derivative works, while still allowing anyone to:

• copy and redistribute the code in any medium or format
• remix, transform, and build upon the code for any purpose, even commercially

Installation

atm-cli is written in Rust, and thus requires the Rust toolchain to compile. Follow the instructions at https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install to install the toolchain. Once that is complete, clone the repo and compile the tool:

$ git clone https://github.com/allthemusicllc/atm-cli.git
$ cd atm-cli
$ git submodule update --init
$ cargo build --release
$ cargo run --release -- -h # show usage

Getting Started

To generate a single MIDI file from a melody, use the gen single directive:

atm gen single 'C:4,D:4,E:4,F:4,G:4,A:4,B:4,C:5' test.mid

To brute-force generate a range of melodies from a set of notes and with a given length, use one of the gen * directive. The example below will output the melodies to a Gzip-compressed Tar file, with a directory structure that guarantees no more than 4,096 files per directory.

atm gen tar-gz -p 2 'C:4,D:4,E:4,F:4,G:4,A:4,B:4,C:5' 8 C4_D4_E4_F4_G4_A4_B4_C5.tar

After generating a range of melodies with one of the gen * directives (beside gen single), use the partition directive to determine which directory a particular melody was written to.

atm partition -p 2 'C:4,C:4,C:4,C:4,C:4,C:4,C:4,C:5'

You can download existing datasets generated by All the Music, LLC from:

https://archive.org/download/allthemusicllc-datasets

Usage

atm 0.3.0
All The Music, LLC
Tools for generating and working with MIDI files. This app was created as part of an effort to generate by brute-force
billions of melodies, and is tailored for that use case

USAGE:
    atm <SUBCOMMAND>

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

SUBCOMMANDS:
    estimate     Estimate output size of storage backends to help make informed decisions about which to use
    gen          Generate melodies (MIDI files) and store them in a file/files
    help         Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
    partition    Generate the partition(s) for a MIDI pitch sequence within a partitioning scheme. If no partition
                 depth is provided, will default to a depth of 1