Makerbot Music

Overview

This page is about using the MakerBot to play music.
Below is a list of tunes that the Makerbot can currently play:

Imperial March [Download] (credit to Marius and Philipp)
Imperial March on all 3 axes Created with Michael Thomson's new mid2cnc.py
Wallance and Gromit Theme Michael Thomson
Daft Punk (credit to Marius and Philipp)
Ronnie James Dio tribute "Man On The Silver Mountain"
Ode to Bre
Still Alive
Tetris
Tetris (3 axes)
Kraftwerk's "Tour De France"
Kraftwerks' "Trans Europe Express"
The Legend of Zelda Theme
Black Sabath "Ironman"
Lady Gaga "Bad Romance"
Bach "Invention No 4"
Ravel "Bolero"
Bubblyfish "Lullaby for a Makerbot"
Erik Satie "Vexations"
Carol of the Bells

Music Videos

Here are a few videos of the MakerBot playing music.

Creating Music

Software

There is a Python script called mid2cnc.py which converts MIDI files into a set of G-Code instructions for CNC machines. The G-Code it produces does not work correctly with the MakerBot.

Luckily, Miles Lightwood of TeamTeamUSA has hacked the script to work with the MakerBot and posted it on github. The code voices the song with the Z axis.

Henning has some Python scripts on github that you might also want to play around with. There is a version that voices the song with the X/Y axes only and an experimental version with support for all three axes.

Update Jan 2011: Michael Thomson has reworked the mid2cnc.py script (available from [https://github.com/michthom/MIDI-to-CNC]) to generalise the code to cope with multiple machine types and multiple axes.

The Python scripts used by Marius Kintel to produce the Imperial March and Daft Punk tunes are also available on SourceForge. The code voices the song with the Z axis.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under GNU Free Documentation License.