This new release of MonoTouch (and MonoMac) come with our new CoreMidi bindings. In the same spirit of the work that we did for AudioToolbox and other frameworks, we created a C# bindings that follows the .NET framework guidelines for the API.

When I started these bindings, I knew close to nothing about MIDI. It is a framework that is not exactly well documented for people new to MIDI, but posts like this helped me get these bindings sorted out.

MonoTouch/MonoMac binding resembles in many ways the object-oriented bindings that developers have created to make CoreMIDI easier to digest. At its core, it is still an object oriented framework, that happens to be exposed with a fairly hostile C interface.

Our interface surfaces the underlying object oriented system with a strongly typed C# interface. Unlike the C interface that exposes a general property querying system that applies to all midi objects (MidiDevice, MidiEndpoint, MidiEntity, MidiPort), the binding ensures that only the available properties for each main class are exposed. This is a convenient way of avoiding a trip to the docs and to google to find samples.

To save developers some pain, as I developed the binding, I documented my findings in the MonoTouch.CoreMIDI documentation and added various samples to our API docs:

Our CoreMidiSample is a tiny program that replicates most of the funcionality of the MIDI sample apps, and is an easy starting point for people that want to get started with MIDI on iOS.

Interesting CoreMidi events are turned into C# events, so you can listen to changes like this:

client = new MidiClient ("CoreMidiSample MIDI CLient");
client.ObjectAdded += delegate(object sender, ObjectAddedOrRemovedEventArgs e) {
	Console.WriteLine ("Object {0} added to {1}", e.Child, e.Parent);
};
client.ObjectRemoved += delegate(object sender, ObjectAddedOrRemovedEventArgs e) {
	Console.WriteLine ("Object {0} removed to {1}", e.Child, e.Parent);
};
client.PropertyChanged += delegate(object sender, ObjectPropertyChangedEventArgs e) {
	Console.WriteLine ("Property {0} changed on {1}", e.PropertyName, e.MidiObject);
};
client.ThruConnectionsChanged += delegate {
	Console.WriteLine ("Thru connections changed");
};
client.SerialPortOwnerChanged += delegate {
	Console.WriteLine ("Serial port changed");
};

//
// Create your input and output ports
//
outputPort = client.CreateOutputPort ("CoreMidiSample Output Port");
inputPort = client.CreateInputPort ("CoreMidiSample Input Port");

// Print out packets when we receive them
inputPort.MessageReceived += delegate(object sender, MidiPacketsEventArgs e) {
    Console.WriteLine ("Got {0} packets", e.Packets.Length);
};