timwedde
py_midicsv
Python

A Python port and library-fication of the midicsv tool by John Walker. If you need to convert MIDI files to human-readable text files and back, this is the library for you.

Last updated May 31, 2026
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py_midicsv

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A Python library inspired by the midicsv tool created by John Walker. Its main purpose is to bidirectionally convert between the binary MIDI format and a human-readable interpretation of the contained data in text format, expressed as CSV. If you found this library, you probably already know why you need it.

Installation

py_midicsv can be installed via pip:

$ pip install py_midicsv

Alternatively you can build the package by cloning this repository and installing via poetry:

$ git clone https://github.com/timwedde/py_midicsv.git $ cd py_midicsv/ $ poetry install

Usage

As a Command Line Tool

Usage: midicsvpy [OPTIONS] INPUTFILE OUTPUTFILE

Convert MIDI files to CSV files.

midicsv reads a standard MIDI file and decodes it into a CSV file which preserves all the information in the MIDI file. The ASCII CSV file may be loaded into a spreadsheet or database application, or processed by a program to transform the MIDI data (for example, to key transpose a composition or extract a track from a multi-track sequence). A CSV file in the format created by midicsv may be converted back into a standard MIDI file with the csvmidi program.

Specify an input file and an output file to process it. Either argument can be stdin/stdout.

Some arguments are kept for backwards-compatibility with the original midicsv tooling. These are marked as NOOP in this command line interface.

Options: -n, --nostrict Do not fail on parse/validation errors. -u, --usage Print usage information (NOOP) -v, --verbose Print debug information (NOOP) --help Show this message and exit.

Usage: csvmidipy [OPTIONS] INPUTFILE OUTPUTFILE

Convert CSV files to MIDI files.

csvmidi reads a CSV file in the format written by midicsv and creates the equivalent standard MIDI file.

Specify an input file and an output file to process it. Either argument can be stdin/stdout.

Some arguments are kept for backwards-compatibility with the original csvmidi tooling. These are marked as NOOP in this command line interface.

Options: -n, --nostrict Do not fail on parse/validation errors. -u, --usage Print usage information (NOOP) -v, --verbose Print debug information (NOOP) -z, --strict-csv Raise exceptions on CSV errors (NOOP) -x, --no-compress Do not compress status bytes (NOOP) --help Show this message and exit.

As a Library

import py_midicsv as pm

Load the MIDI file and parse it into CSV format

csvstringlist = pm.miditocsv("example.mid")

with open("example_converted.csv", "w") as f: f.writelines(csvstringlist)

Parse the CSV output of the previous command back into a MIDI file

midiobject = pm.csvtomidi(csvstring_list)

Save the parsed MIDI file to disk

with open("exampleconverted.mid", "wb") as outputfile: midiwriter = pm.FileWriter(outputfile) midiwriter.write(midiobject)

Documentation

A full explanation of the midicsv file format can be found here.

Differences

This library adheres as much as possible to how the original library works, however generated files are not guaranteed to be entirely identical when compared bit-by-bit. This is mostly due to the handling of meta-event data, especially lyric events, since the encoding scheme has changed. The original library did not encode some of the characters in the Latin-1 set, while this version does.

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