[linux-audio-dev] System Exclusive question

[Jay Vaughan]

>I took a look at MidiShare, but unfortunately it wont work on NetBSD as
>it depends on a kernel module. I have tried using Linux, but gave up
>when I couldn't get ALSA or OSS to recognise my USB MIDI interface, (a
>Yamaha UX96). Under NetBSD it's recognised as soon as I plug it in.
>

Ah, good point, I missed that detail about NetBSD, sorry about that.

>I did Google around expecting there to be lots of convenient MIDI
>libraries, but I couldn't find any. Is ALSA that good that no one uses
>anything else? It seems to be overkill for System Exclusive stuff to
>use a high level library though, especially as the details differ on
>virtually every MIDI device.

In most 'high level' MIDI API's you can just write your own callback 
handler and tell the API to send you completely parsed SYSEX blocks 
... there's no need to deal with the MIDI system at all.  This seems 
pretty easy to me, or at least it did until I understood your NetBSD 
issue.

You might find Will Weston's VSEX (Virus Sysex Library for Linux)
tool to be inspirational - it does what you want to do for the
Roland, albeit for our Virus synths: http://www.aarg.net/~weston/vsex.html

Let's hear how things go ... maybe its just something simple ...

-- 

;

Jay Vaughan
r&d>>music:technology:synthesizers - www.access-music.de/