Everything MIDItools is now on GitHub

The MIDItools® computer was a generic hardware device designed to perform MIDI operations. Designed by Craig Anderton, Bob Moses, and Greg Bartlett, it consisted of a chassis, a main board called the CPU board, and a front panel board. The CPU board hosted a Motorola 6805 processor, a MIDI interface, some extra memory and an analog to digital converter. The front panel board contained 8 switches, 16 LED's, a potentiometer and an LCD display. The CPU board also had sockets for connecting the front panel, LCD and an optional expansion board via ribbon cables. Read Digital Projects for Musicians by Craig Anderton, Bob Moses, and Greg Bartlett for a full understanding of MIDItools®, MIDI hardware and software.

The MIDItools® product line is long discontinued and parts are no longer available. But the software and documentation have been preserved: application notes, assembly manuals, board schematics, firmware for all 34 tools, and the assembly source were recovered in 2026.

Open the MIDItools archive github.com/ilauraj/miditools-archive

A rack-mount MIDItools unit: blue anodized front panel with a value fader,
a 16-character LCD, eight buttons and sixteen channel indicator LEDs. — The rack-mount front panel. The same display shown above sat behind that window.

What the archive holds

26 application notes — what each tool did, and how its display read
17 manuals — assembly and operation, as originally printed
Board schematics — CPU, human interface, relay driver and patch bay
Firmware for 34 tools — the original images, byte for byte
Assembly source for 33 tools, the shared BIOS, and the build that made them

If you have any MIDItools material not preserved on GitHub, or notice any errors, please open an issue.