[Note: this isn't working yet. It's a work-in-progress, doesn't work, not a great example of exemplary Rust, &etc. &etc. &etc.]

Wanting to write something nontrivial in Rust, I figured I'd take an old project concept I did in college and resurrect it, taking advantage of a few years of maturity. See the bit on "backstory, nostalgia" below. The "Options" section is mostly for what I'm hoping to do with it as I write more of it.

Where are we? Just started -- it parses the most basic MIDI files, but not anything that's circulating due to the many formats MIDI can take. But it's passing tests, so it's on its way.

Duffy takes a MIDI file as input, and produces a set of bash scripts for each of the input file's tracks that, when executed, will beep your computer's PC speaker for that audio data. This requires a PC speaker (the hardware kind that lives in your chassis, not a proper music speaker) and installation of the UNIX beep utility.

duffy <options> input

options:
  
  --start=<time>

      How far to read into the MIDI file before beginning to encode the beep
      files. Good for when you have a MIDI track with an indulgent
      introduction, and you just want the meat.
      <time> can be formatted like a YouTube video tag, so "1m32s," "45s,"
      or "0m33s" are acceptable values. Defaults to "0m0s"

  --end=<time>
      
      Like `--start`, determines when we stop encoding. If you input a value
      greater than the MIDI file has data for, the script will just go to
      the end. Time format same as above.

  --max-length=<seconds>
      
      Many MIDI files are programmed to loop forever. We default to 25
      seconds (these beep scripts are cute, but can be disrupting to others
      on the machine or workspace) but you can use this flag to set the
      maximum length you'd like the beep scripts to go for.

  --tracks=<tracks>

      A comma-separated list of the tracks you want to encode, where each
      track is a number. If you know this MIDI file and know the melody is
      on track 4, you can isolate it this way without producing the other
      files. If you have a 12-track MIDI and you only want three of them,
      you can all this as `duffy tracks=1,11,6

Back in college, Saurya and I often pranked each other, or other students in the SunLab. Among the typical hijinx (someone leaves a computer unlocked, alias lsplease="/bin/ls" && alias ls="echo \"lolno, say lsplease\"") the most popular of these was a little Scheme script I wrote to consume a monophanous LilyPond file and produce a bash script calling the Unix beep command in the melody of the input file.

So for example, you could write

d8 d e4 d g fis2 d8 d e4 d a' g2

Which Lilypond would output as this. My script would then produce:

#!/bin/bash
#
# "Happy Birthday"

beep -f 293.66 -l time -d 250    # d8
beep -f 293.66 -l time -d 250    # d
beep -f 329.63 -l time -d 500    # e4
beep -f 293.66 -l time -d 500    # d
beep -f 392.00 -l time -d 500    # g
beep -f 369.99 -l time -d 1000   # fis2
beep -f 293.66 -l time -d 250    # d8
beep -f 293.66 -l time -d 250    # d
beep -f 329.63 -l time -d 500    # e4
beep -f 293.66 -l time -d 500    # d
beep -f 440 -l time -d 500       # a
beep -f 392.00 -l time -d 1000   # g2

Which you could execute in a SunLab computer. For good or ill, Max Salvas' computers (MAX BUILT) had PC speakers in the chassis, so you could remotely log into someone else's machine, run the script, and they'd hear whatever you played them from the box under their desk.

Saurya then wrote a script to scan a room in the building for all its computers (TA lab, SunLab, etc.) and run an arbitrary script on all of them at the same time.

We had 4-8 bars of many popular themes -- Zelda, Mario, and we'd have the physical boxes in the room literally hum Happy Birthday on people's birthdays. This eventually led to 'beep' getting removed because we put all these scripts on our publicly-visible directories, wanting to share, and people abused it.

The Scheme script to convert LilyPond->Beep is lost, but I'm re-writing it to handle a more popular format.

Named after Dustin Duffy, the Beeper King! Thanks to Ashely Tuccero of Etsy for the name :)