NAME

boomwhacker - Convert MIDI file to play-along boomwhacker animation

SYNOPSIS

boomwhacker [OPTIONS..] song.mid song.pdf

DESCRIPTION

Convert MIDI file to play-along boomwhacker animation as PDF document. For conversion to an actual video format we recommend rendering pages to PNG or JPEG using ghostscript and merge frames and audio using FFmpeg.

OPTIONS

-h, --help

Show all options with a short description and quit immediately.

--rate FPS

Number of frames per second.

--background JPEG

Use the according image as background. The image extent is also used as size of the video frames.

--background-frames JPEG-DIR

Use all files found in directory as a sequence of background frames. Use this to use a background video instead of a still image. Files are included in lexicographic order and are expected to be in JPEG format and to all have the same size and the frame rate by default is expected to match the one specified with the --rate option. If there are less frames than required for the duration of the MIDI track, the frames are cycled. Also see --background-loop-overlap option.

This is our poor man's way to support background videos without the need to handle video formats. However it requires (lossy) conversion of the input video to a sequence of JPEG files (e.g. using ffmpeg), which also requires a lot of disk space. Caution: This creates huge PDF files because there is no inter-frame compression. You can reduce memory consumption using cycles of short video clips.

--background-frames-rate

Actual frame rate of the background video.

--background-loop-overlap SECONDS

Blend loop end and loop start for the given number or fraction of seconds. Overlap duration must be shorter than half of the duration of the background video loop.