[linux-audio-dev] Best-performing Linux-friendly MIDI interfaces?

[Jay Vaughan]

what i meant was that there has been dramatically insufficient attention
>paid to the development of ALSA tools and/or APIs that provide the kind
>of functionality that desktop users want.

man, never forget that you live surrrounded quite literally by tens 
of millions of people.  your early success is just the beginning.

not everyone writes code as functional as you do.  yet.  your work 
pushes the edge.

>it has been put off and put
>off as the other parts of ALSA have evolved, and now we have a really
>very powerful and flexible system that is more or less unusable from a
>control point of view (for desktop users).
>

indeed, such a space for app writers does exist.  in fact if i could 
fault linux/OSS hackers for one fault, it would be for their 
infallible belief that once their code is done and running, nothing 
else matters.

>software mixing was something (for example) that in retrospect clearly
>should have been on the table from day one.
>

volume of a sound-source is but -one- parameter.  what i find ironic 
about the whole "MIDI API" versus "MIDI API" slant is the fact that, 
whatever the API, the lessons of GM (general midi) are gladly ignored 
for 'new-fangled science'.  ;)

>simple mixer interfaces, ditto.

16,000 or so, values, in MIDI ... for Volume at least, as a parameter.

>
>asound.conf .... something required, god knows what :)
>

bah.  this is, in my opinion, bloat.  pure and simple.

>at the moment, if ALSA doesn't quite work for you, then its probably
>going to be very hard (for a non-audio-geek) to make it work. of course,
>if it does work, it generally works very well.
>

right, on this point, i agree wholeheartedly, and i comple and ally 
with anyone who has it running.  but: never ignore the fact you are 
unique for getting an ALSA setup worth ignoring and just working with 
..

>its not that jaroslav, takashi and others didn't know this - but the
>manpower available was so low that these desktop-friendly issues took a
>back seat. thats how it looks from here, anyway.

well, leave your navel alone and pay attention to some atrophy-earning arena's.

>and also, some of these
>issues are hard. the debate over soundservers is indicative of just how
>difficult it can be to get any kind of agreement on how to to solve even
>a completely obvious problem.

what works, persists.  same with steam engines, same with software.

-- 

;

Jay Vaughan