what
MidiChords is a plug-in that displays chords in a scrolling window in a realtime fashion derived from the MIDI data input to the plug-in. It does not modify the MIDI data. See the readme for details: https://github.com/markwilkins/midi-chord-reader#readme
My intended target for this is my own version of Logic Pro X. So all of my testing has been done with the AU (audio unit) plug-in. I did build the VST3 version as well but have only tested it with the Juce audio plugin host app.
the installer
The installer is super basic and (most important) is not signed. I don't have an Apple Developer account outside of my day job. Since this is only for me and quite possibly won't be used by anyone else, I have chosen not to pay the money to join the developer program for now. This means that if you do try to install it, you will see the message indicating it is evil: "... cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer." If you right click on the file and choose open, then you get an additional warning.
And, honestly, I think that is fantastic. I really like how Apple does this and enforces this safety. I like their app store, I like this policy. It's all cool and helps provide for a safe environment. So, what do you do if you actually want to install this?
If you are a developer, you can just clone the repo and build it (I think I included the necessary information in the readme). If you are not a developer, you probably would find that tedious, difficult, and very annoying. So I have included a hashes.txt file with the checksums of the install file. And also included them here:
Checksum of MidiChords_0.8.1.pkg
MD5: fc48df0af4098873abe039f1f45b6d4f
SHA256: 0a349545a54e04e96346b0efd8f0b7cfa8af4f102ffc7dfc365151fd2bcab9ed
If you download the pkg installer file, you can check them by running the hashes against the pkg file. There are multiple ways; you can search the interwebs for examples. A couple examples are:
md5 filename
shasum -a 256 filename
If the output of those commands (one of them is probably sufficient) matches the published values, then you can be relatively certain that the pkg file you have is the one that I have uploaded here. In other words, it has not been subject to tampering. If the results do not match, then definitely DO NOT run the installer. It means the file has either been corrupted and won't work or has been tampered with.
So then it becomes a matter of whether you trust me. Some links follow to "verify" me as a human and show that I am probably an actual person and a developer who doesn't suck too much and who also makes music that (I think) doesn't suck too much.
about me
https://stackoverflow.com/users/23478/mark-wilkins
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marklwilkins/
https://soundcloud.com/markwilkins
https://open.spotify.com/artist/0u61kTPMwzp6uA0E9ZxRq0?si=LnM4FV9BQRmVvUi80uvlvg