LilyPond - supress/skip MIDI generation

Question

When I work on my LilyPond scores, especially in the end when I just tweak on some graphical settings, it would be quite nice if it was possible to skip the Midi generation, even though it is not very time consuming. Is this possible from the command-line in a similar way then to skip the pdf generation?

Again I have not been able to find something in the LilyPond Documentary section about the Command-Line Options.

---

Update:

if I had the \midi {} block only in one line, I could simply comment it out by using sed from the command-line, with something like: sed -i 's/\\midi\ {}/%&/g' file.ly. While the option -i stands for inplace-editing. Without the option sed is going to print to stdout. You could also use wildcarts to batch process a bunch of files: *.ly would process all files ending with .ly in the current directory.

It would get more difficult, if the \midi block was bigger then a single line, like here with setting the tempo:

\version "2.18.2"

\score {
  <<
    \new Staff = "celloI" \with { midiInstrument = #"cello" }
    \relative c {
      \clef bass
      c4( d e f
      g1) \bar "|."
    }
    \new Staff = "celloII" \with { midiInstrument = #"cello" }
    \relative c, {
      \clef bass
      c4( d e f
      g1) \bar "|."
    }
  >>
  \layout {}
  \midi {
    \tempo 2 = 120
  } 
}

Answer 1

As far as I know, LilyPond does not provide a command line option for this. The only way I can think of is to comment out the midi block. However, your approach using sed is very promising!

To avoid the problem of your midi block containing several lines, you could write a macro that contains the whole midi block with all your settings and place this macro into your score block. You should then be able to use sed to replace this single line from your code.

I was not able to test this with sed, but if you change your code as follows, it should work with something like sed -i 's/\\mymidi/%&/g' file.ly:

\version "2.19.83"

mymidi = \midi {
    \tempo 2 = 120
  } 

\score {
  <<
    \new Staff = "celloI" \with { midiInstrument = #"cello" }
    \relative c {
      \clef bass
      c4( d e f
      g1) \bar "|."
    }
    \new Staff = "celloII" \with { midiInstrument = #"cello" }
    \relative c, {
      \clef bass
      c4( d e f
      g1) \bar "|."
    }
  >>
  \layout {}
  \mymidi 
}

If you have more than one score block, you would need to create several macros for the midi blocks and change the sed command accordingly.

The above code, however, seems to work only as from version 2.19.