Welcome to the Rogus McBogus home page


Rogus McBogus is a C++ library that allows fast and easy development of programs that can receive, process, and transmit MIDI data. Rogus allows such systems to be created by writing a module of C++ code called a "parser". The parser contains the application-specific code, and Rogus supplies the parser with incoming MIDI data and provides functions the parser can call to send out MIDI data. In addition, Rogus supplies some higher level abstractions, most notably the Score Player, which the parser may choose to use if it is appropriate to the application.

Rogus McBogus is currently implemented for Windows NT and 95, but it is meant to be highly portable. Only the Rogus Basics are platform dependent; the Score Player and MIDI Library are totally portable. Parsers can be written in a machine-independent way and used on any platform which Rogus supports.

Version 1.9 Alpha of Rogus McBogus is now publicly available and can be downloaded from this site. Previous versions can be downloaded as well, although users are encouraged to use the most recent version. Be aware that versions 1.9a and higher of Rogus do not support versions of MSVC++ earlier than 5.0. This is due to incomplete support for namespaces and the lack of type "bool" in these earlier versions. If you really want to use 1.9a or higher with 5.0 or lower, you can modify Rogus pretty easily by removing all the namespace stuff & #typdefing bool.

A project related to Rogus McBogus is Rogus McJava, a collection of Java classes that allows you to read and write MIDI files. Rogus McBogus (C++) can only read MIDI files but Rogus McJava can read and write. There is no documentation for RogusMcJava. You can download the zipped classes here or browse the classes directly here.

Rogus McBogus was developed by Ben Denckla and Patrick Pelletier at the MIT Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The main reason Rogus was written was to provide a foundation for the MIDI software of the Brain Opera. If you have questions or comments about Rogus, Ben and Patrick would love to hear from you. You can contact them at bdenckla@media.mit.edu and pepellet@mit.edu, respectively.

Rogus McBogus documentation, by version

1.9a 1.8a 1.7a 1.6a 1.5a 1.4a 1.3a 1.2a 1.1


MIDI programming software similar to Rogus McBogus

A great site for general information about MIDI: Harmony Central


Modified 2 Jun 1997 rogus-maintainer@media.mit.edu