Musical MIDI Accompaniment

Welcome to the home page and central clearing house for MMA - Musical MIDI Accompaniment.

“MMA—Musical MIDI Accompaniment” is an accompaniment generator. It creates MIDI tracks for a soloist to perform over from a user supplied file containing chords and MMA directives.

MMA is very versatile and generates excellent tracks. It comes with an extensive user-extendable library with a variety of patterns for various popular rhythms, detailed user manuals, and several demo songs.

MMA is a command line driven program. It creates MIDI files which are then played by a sequencer or MIDI file play program.

How good is MMA's output? Well, to start you might want to check out some of my own recordings. And here is a song created TOTALLY with MMA. Give a listen . . . I was impressed and I wrote MMA! My understanding is that Kara took an existing Yahama .sty file, converted it to MMA library format, wrote a MMA song file with a few chords, compiled, and that's about it. Very cool! Finally, here's another song by Kara, Sunshine Of My Life, which was done in studio with a MMA background track.

I have completed a complete CD of my saxophone playing with MMA backgrounds. Give a listen, and buy it, at Cedars.

People all over the world are using MMA on a daily basis. From Bach Fugues (really!) to Jazz to Country to Techno to just about anything you can imagine MMA's templating track system puts you in control of your music.

MMA is written in Python. You'll need version 2.7.0 or greater of Python for MMA to work. In addition to the Python 2 series, MMA also works with all versions of Python 3.x.

MMA was started in 2003 and was in BETA for over 3 years and had over 24 releases before we decided that it was time for the 1.0 version (release 21.09.3 is now available). We continue to tweak the program to make it better ... but, right now it is a pretty darned nice piece of software. Please help the community by advising us of bugs, creating songs for distribution, and new and improved library files.

There are lots of other generators like MMA. The most popular are “Band In A Box” and “Jammer”. The problem with many of these programs is that they lock you into a proprietary format, work only with limited computing platforms, or insist on a silly GUI which limits your choices. You might think that the lack of a GUI is limiting, but we've found that MMA's method gives you maximum flexibility in setting volumes, effects, patterns, etc.

MMA is free! Yes, this means you don't have to pay for it—more importantly it means that you can use (or even change) MMA in any manner you want. MMA is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

MMA is developed on a Linux platform, but should be usable on just about any modern computer system.

Yes, it works on Windows and Mac!