Monthly Archives: July 2021

My MIDI “Listening Box”

Basically I wanted a way to just be able to sit down at my digital piano, turn it on, and with a minimum of extra gear and steps, be able to start playing and capture the MIDI stream. The idea is to move the raw MIDI file to the big DAW for further editing/arranging/etc. Even going to a SSD main drive on my music production PC, it just seemed like overkill when all I want to do is capture MIDI noodling on my Yamaha CP88 electronic piano.

The solution I came up with is not 0-cost, but I already had the $200 barebones Chromebook. All I needed to buy was the $14.99 FL Studio Mobile app (6 stars out of 5!) and a USB extender ($25) since the stupid Chromebook has exactly one USB port (can you believe it?)

Anyway, a training professional will probably vomit at the amateurishness but I can’t spend a million hours making it perfect. I used Nero Video and exactly 0% copyrighted material.

You can check it out on youtube here (it’s about 8:25 long).

Minor update 2022-04-09