[LAU] Bridging alsa and jack midi

[Len Ovens]

On Fri, 26 Sep 2014, Will Godfrey wrote:

> I confess I'm getting *more* confused about all of this :(
>
> I use up to 3 hardware MIDI ports for my compositions along with Rosegarden
> (which is ALSA MIDI only). Up to now I've been getting along quite well with
> this, as all the other software I use can work with ALSA.
>
> While I fully appreciate the issues around supporting both forms I'm getting a
> bit concerned by the push towards a JACK only system.

As with audio, where the SW designer can support either ALSA, pulse or 
Jack for inputs or outputs, the SW designer can include either or both 
ALSA and/or Jack MIDI. a2jmidi could be useful to you as well as it would 
allow you to connect jack MIDI only SW to your ALSA MIDI only SW. True, 
you would have to run a jack server. From the SW designer's POV, jack 
provides a more stable MIDI even on systems that do not have the OS 
tweaked for ALSA MIDI. So why would they design for something more 
problematic? My personal experience (which is very small BTW) has been 
that the Jack MIDI API is much easier to use as well. The only downside 
(which I have not yet to run into) is that jack is limited in the size of 
the MIDI event it can deal with. An event would include a sysex and in jack 
this would be expected to be completed in one period (along with all audio 
processing too).

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net