play_midi(3alleg4)

🎀 play_midi — the Allegro manual, but make it cute 🎀

okay bestie, welcome to the Allegro manual 💖 this one lives in section 3 (3alleg4), it's part of the Allegro game programming library, and today we're talking about play_midi — the function that makes your game go 🎵✨

✨ NAME ✨

play_midi — starts playing the specified MIDI file. Allegro game programming library. no cap, that's literally it, and it's iconic for it 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

#include <allegro.h>

int play_midi(MIDI *midi, int loop);

she's short, she's simple, she takes a MIDI * and an int, and she EATS 🔥

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So here's the vibe: play_midi starts playing the specified MIDI file, and the first thing it does — before anything else — is stop whatever music was previously playing. no overlap, no messy transitions, one track at a time, periodt 💀

Then there's the loop flag, and bestie this is the whole personality of the function:

• if loop is set to non-zero, the data will be repeated until replaced with something else — it just goes and goes and goes, main character energy 🔁
• otherwise it will stop at the end of the file, and that's that, a lil finite bop 🎶

And the sneaky one: passing a NULL pointer will stop whatever music is currently playing. that's right, NULL is your "shut it down" button, she's giving silence as a feature 🙈

💜 RETURN VALUE 💜

Returns non-zero if an error occurs 😭 and ngl the docs are very honest about when that might happen: this may happen if a patch-caching wavetable driver is unable to load the required samples.

…or at least it might in the future when somebody writes some patch-caching wavetable drivers :-)

yes the manpage really did put a smiley in there. we love a humble king 🫶

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

the whole friend group, go say hi 💖

• install_sound(3alleg4)
• load_midi(3alleg4)
• play_looped_midi(3alleg4)
• stop_midi(3alleg4)
• midi_pause(3alleg4)
• midi_seek(3alleg4)
• midi_pos(3alleg4)
• midi_time(3alleg4)
• midi_msg_callback(3alleg4)
• exmidi(3alleg4)

and that's the page, bestie 🎀 this was Allegro version 4.4.3, and the page is play_midi(3alleg4) — mwah, go make some music, iykyk ✨💅🦋