[LAU] Sustainer 0.1 : a daemon to provide sustain pedal to softsynths that don't support it

[Ken Restivo]

Sustainer is a tiny ALSA MIDI daemon that provides sustain pedal functionality to softsynths that don't support the sustain pedal (such as PHASEX, AMS, Specimen, etc.). 

http://restivo.org/projects/sustainer/

I use the sustain pedal a lot in live performance for holding down pads while tweaking knobs or playing other parts (or both). It was annoying me that so many of my favorite softsynths for making pads, didn't support the sustain pedal though.

I didn't feel like hacking all the softsynths that didn't have sustain pedal functionality, so I decided to solve it the Unix way by making a tiny utility to do what I wanted. I needed this to scratch my personal itch, and I'm publishing it so that others may enjoy it if they need something like this.

I don't use JACK MIDI yet; I'm one of those luddites still on version 0.103 of JACK and refusing to take any risks on newer versions. But JACK MIDI is very straightforward, so at some point I'll convert this utility to native JACK MIDI.

-ken