[LAD] [Jack-Devel] JACK & MIDI

[Pieter Palmers]

Dave Robillard wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-01-18 at 14:38 +0100, Pieter Palmers wrote:
>> If someone comes up with a decent 'event protocol' I'm volunteer to 
>> implement it in jack, alongside the current jack-midi API (as an 
>> experimental feature). From an implementations perspective it's a 
>> no-brainer.
>>
>> But can someone please tell me what to implement. And not in a vague 
>> way. IMHO that's the real issue, and the 3 points you now mention are 
>> only the first steps along that path. Please don't stop there. Take the 
>> time to write a funded proposal that can be discussed, and then implemented.
> 
> I don't think bloating Jack up with umpteen different event protocols is
> a very good idea when they can all be transported with virtually
> identical APIs.
> 
> An event in Jack is just a certain length of bytes with a timestamp
> anyway, you /could/ theoretically just cram OSC messages into a Jack
> MIDI port if the receiving app was expecting it... there's just no type
> field in events, and the names of the functions in the API imply it's
> MIDI specific (which it isn't, really)

The similarity is why I indicate it at as a no-brainer btw. As fair as I 
can see it comes down to introducing a type field in the event structure 
and generalizing the current _midi_ functions to _event_ ones. And 
providing _midi_ wrappers. That on itself would allow people to 
experiment with whatever event they prefer, without interfering with 
normal jack behavior.

It is also something that should be 'experimental' in the sense that it 
would be there for the adventurous to fool around with and see what 
happens, in order to gain experience for jack 2.0. Maybe that will help 
to do it in a decent way from the start.

Greets,

Pieter