Developer Geert Bevin (Moog Music, LinnStrument, the MPE Specification) has released a new tool, ShowMIDI 1.0.0, that turns MIDI information into beautiful and easy to understand visuals.

Most MIDI tools display the protocol’s messages as essentially a ‘firehose’ of data, which can make it challenging to understand. ShowMIDI parses and visualizes the data, translating the stream of details into concise charts and visualizations that make it much easier to understand.

“Instead of wading through logs of MIDI messages to correlate relevant ones and identify what is happening, ShowMIDI visualizes the current activity and hides what you don’t care about anymore,” explains Bevin. “It provides you with a real-time, glanceable view of all MIDI activity on your computer.”

Best of, it’s free and available now for iOS, Linux, Mac & Windows.

ShowMIDI is designed to be always on. Using the spacebar or play/pause button, you can pause the flow and focus on a data snapshot with the latest state of any MIDI entity.

ShowMIDI can be run as a standalone application that automatically detects all your MIDI devices, or as an AUv3 plugin in your DAW or host to visualize MIDI data in your sessions.

ShowMIDI visualizes:

• MIDI ports
• channels
• program change
• note on/off
• channel pressure
• polyphonic pressure
• continuous control change
• pitchbend
• RPN and NRPN
• MPE configuration and channel modes

In addition to being free, ShowMIDI is available as open source via Github.