Free ShowMIDI is the easiest and prettiest way to monitor MIDI; now in V1.0

Geert Bevin’s amazing, beautiful, completely free and open-source ShowMIDI has reached the 1.0 milestone, with new features and an updated video tutorial. If you want to monitor MIDI on Mac, Windows, Linux or iOS, your ship has arrived.

Version 1.0 added a lot – and if you haven’t been up to date, ShowMIDI has received constant updates to its functionality and design. Best of all, you can now get it on iOS via the App Store – still for free. (For some reason, it’s not in the Mac App Store; you should still use the GitHub version.) There’s also 14-bit MIDI support for higher-resolution data, and tempos displayed as bpm.

Full feature log for this:

• Improved channel ordering algorithm. Now the channel appears at the top of the list and maintains its order until it disappears.
• Added support for displaying MIDI data as scrolling graphs with height settings: compact, medium, and large.
• Added support for 14-bit and high resolution MIDI control change messages.
• Added support for MIDI clock displayed as BPM.
• Added support for starting, continuing, and stopping the MIDI clock.
• Added the ability to hide or show all devices by holding down alt / option key when toggling device visibility in the sidebar.
• Added a reset button to clear all MIDI data.
• Added “never” as a timeout delay option.
• Added keyboard shortcuts for switching visualization style and resetting MIDI data.
• Added tooltips to sidebar buttons.
• Various stability improvements.
• Updated the macOS app icon to be the same size as other icons.
• Updated CLAP JUCE extension.
• Updated JUCE to version 7.0.12.
• iOS version available for free in the App Store

https://github.com/gbevin/ShowMIDI/releases

An instructional video is also available:

Check out the project website for all resources:

https://github.com/gbevin/ShowMIDI

I’m curious what people use for OSC (OpenSoundControl), which is a bit harder to monitor. Here’s one tool built into Processing that has the advantage of being easy to modify if you’re familiar with the environment.

But one tool I use alongside ShowMIDI is definitely the Hexler Protocol. And really hope ShowMIDI doesn’t try to match that feature. ShowMIDI is great for visualizing MIDI at once; Protokol is a better general purpose monitoring tool that also covers OSC, ArtNet (coming soon), gamepads, and more. According to hexkler’s threads, this tool seems to be on track for a quick release, and you can test it out now. Previously: