Midi To Bytebeat File

Choose conversion strategy:

Implement voice synthesis primitives in integer arithmetic; test at chosen fs.

Tune scaling, clipping, and aliasing behaviors; listen for musical artifacts and embrace some (they often define bytebeat aesthetic).

Export as a bytebeat expression or as raw PCM.

Standard midi to bytebeat converters ignore Pitch Bend and Control Change messages. However, advanced converters map Pitch Bend to a frequency modulation parameter inside the formula. For example, (t * (note + bend)) & 255.

Let’s be honest: most of us first heard ByteBeat and thought, “That’s cool, but how do I actually write a song in it?”

ByteBeat is the strange, beautiful child of demoscene math and algorithmic audio. You give a simple equation — something like (t*(t>>12|t>>8))&0xFF — and it spits out a raw waveform, one sample at a time. No samples. No synthesizers. Just numbers. midi to bytebeat

But composing directly in math is hard. MIDI is easy.

So I spent last weekend writing a bridge: MIDI to ByteBeat. Choose conversion strategy:

Here’s how it works, why it matters, and where you can try it yourself.

Use a MIDI parsing library (in Python, JavaScript, or C) to extract note events. For each note, store: Standard midi to bytebeat converters ignore Pitch Bend

Example output (pseudo-table):

Note: 60, start=0, end=44100, vel=100
Note: 64, start=22050, end=66150, vel=80