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Published: Oct 21, 2015

Enumerate messages of a MIDIPacket using Swift reflection

In Enumerate MIDIPacketList in Swift we built an extension for MIDIPacketList that enabled easy enumeration of its MIDIPacket objects. In this post we go one step further by enumerating the messages contained within a MIDIPacket.

#
What is a MIDIPacket?

A MIDIPacket is a representation of one or more MIDI messages. Most messages consist of a status byte followed by one or two data bytes.

Learn more about the MIDI specification.

Consider a packet with a length of 10 bytes that contains four distinct MIDI messages.

Given this packet, Swift’s MIDIPacket definition is intriguing:

// Extracted from the CoreMIDI Swift framework
public struct MIDIPacket {
  public var timeStamp: MIDITimeStamp
  public var length: UInt16
  public var data: (UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8)
  public init()
  public init(timeStamp: MIDITimeStamp, length: UInt16, data: (UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8, UInt8))
}

In essence MIDIPacket is represented by:

the length of the packet,
a tuple of 256 UInt8 values (shortened in the code snippet above).

The bytes aren’t represented as an array like one might expect. Instead the bytes are stored in a fixed-size tuple. A glance at the Swift header docs reveals:

[data] is declared to be 256 bytes in length so clients don’t have to create custom data structures in simple situations.

Representing the bytes as a tuple ironically makes iterating over the messages harder because it’s not easy to iterate over tuple values.

We’ll use the helper function generatorForTuple defined in Enumerating tuple values in Swift in order to iterate over data’s bytes. Read the post to learn more about how this function works.

#
Extracting messages

We’ll start by making MIDIPacket conform to SequenceType:

extension MIDIPacket: SequenceType {
  public func generate() -> AnyGenerator<Message> {

    return anyGenerator {
      return nil
    }
  }
}

Message is a type defined in a separate article, MIDI messages as a Swift enum.

#
State

The generator state includes a generator for our tuple values and an index that tracks our iteration progress.

public func generate() -> AnyGenerator<Message> {
  var generator = generatorForTuple(self.data)
  var index: UInt16 = 0

Read Enumerating tuple values in Swift to learn how generatorForTuple works.

#
Iterating the generator

We’ll design the iterator such that each byte is accessed only once. To do this we’ll define an inline closure called pop that generates the next UInt8 value from the data tuple. This closure will also increment our index so that we know how far along we are.

return anyGenerator {
  func pop() -> UInt8 {
    assert(index < self.length)
    index++
    return generator.next() as! UInt8
  }

  let byte = pop()

  // TODO: Create the Message.

  assert(false, "Unimplemented message \(byte)")
  return nil
}

We assume that MIDIPacket only contains well-formed messages but still assert in pop as a safeguard against reading past the packet’s length.
generatorForTuple’s enumeration value is an Any type so we must cast to UInt8.

#
Creating the message

The type of a MIDI byte is defined by the most-significant bit. 1 is a status byte, 0 is a data byte. This means that data bytes can only provide 7 bits of information.

For the purposes of this article we’re going to assume that the MIDI data is well-formed. In a production environment care must be taken to follow the MIDI specification’s recommendation to gracefully ignore malformed messages.

if (byte & 0x80) == 0x80 { // Status byte
}

If the byte is a status byte then we know that the top four bits represent the message and the lower four bits represent the channel:

if (byte & 0x80) == 0x80 { // Status byte
  let status = byte & 0xF0
  let channel = byte & 0x0F

We use message to identify the MIDI message and the number of data bytes as defined by the MIDI specification.

if (byte & 0x80) == 0x80 { // Status byte
  let message = byte & 0xF0
  let channel = byte & 0x0F
  switch message {
  case 0x80: return .NoteOff(channel: channel, key: pop(), velocity: pop())
  case 0x90: return .NoteOn(channel: channel, key: pop(), velocity: pop())
  case 0xA0: return .Aftertouch(channel: channel, key: pop(), pressure: pop())
  case 0xB0: return .ControlChange(channel: channel, controller: pop(), value: pop())
  case 0xC0: return .ProgramChange(channel: channel, programNumber: pop())
  case 0xD0: return .ChannelPressure(channel: channel, pressure: pop())
  case 0xE0:
    // From http://www.midi.org/techspecs/Messages.php
    // The pitch bender is measured by a fourteen bit value. The first data byte contains the
    // least significant 7 bits. The second data bytes contains the most significant 7 bits.
    let low = UInt16(pop() & 0x7F)
    let high = UInt16(pop() & 0x7F)
    return .PitchBend(channel: channel, pitch: (high << 7) | low)
  default:
    assert(false, "Unimplemented message \(byte)")
    return nil
  }

Each invocation of pop consumes a single byte from the data tuple.
Pitch bending is a 14 bit value represented across two data bytes.
We don’t need to prefix each return value with Message because Swift is able to infer this from our generate() method return type.

#
Termination case

In order to safely terminate the generator we check index against the packet’s length:

return anyGenerator {
  if index >= self.length {
    return nil
  }

#
Concluding thoughts

View the final implementation on GitHub.

← MIDI messages as a Swift associated enum

Hashable CFString in Swift →

Enumerate messages of a MIDIPacket using Swift reflection

#What is a MIDIPacket?

#Extracting messages

#State

#Iterating the generator

#Creating the message

#Termination case