Any chance of adding midi support to the built in music editor? All I'd care about is typing in notes using a musical keyboard rather than qwerty keyboard, don't care about velocities and all that other stuff. This is the only thing holding me back from doing 100% of my dev from inside Pico-8, which is something I really would love to do, especially on my pico-pi.

I like to use my nanoKEY2 midi keyboard, which is small, cute and elegant like Pico-8, for typing notes into music trackers.

I tried to use this: https://superuser.com/questions/1170136/translating-midi-input-into-computer-keystrokes-on-linux

but Pico-8 uses the keyboard directly, hence my request.

I agree that would be nice. But maybe one of these tools would be useful to you?

• https://github.com/andmatand/midi-to-pico8
• https://github.com/gamax92/midi2pico

I'm not familiar with any midi composing software unfortunately; if I wind up composing outside of Pico-8 I'll probably write a python script to convert from famitracker's text export to pico 8's format. Thankfully I've already done this for another 8 bit platform, the NES, haha.

Still though I would really really love to be able to just use my nanokey2 inside of Pico-8.

Spent some more time in the Pico-8 music editor and I realized the way it is laid out

 s d  g h j               <--sharps   c#d#f#g#a#                     
z x cv b n m              <--naturals cdefgab                       

visually matches the shape of a keyboard.

I can get used to this. :)

Still it would be a neat feature.

On the Mac, you can use the free midiStroke program to map MIDI events to keystrokes. This works with Pico-8: I can use my Novation LaunchKey Mini to enter notes in the Pico-8 tracker.

It's not perfect: the timing of what I play is lost. But I find it easier than using the keyboard.

@dredds, you helped me a lot.
Wish you good health.