[LAD] MIDI in jack

[Len Ovens]

Hello new to this list but realized I was asking a lot of development 
questions in LAU that would probably be better here.

I am writing a program that takes some system input from the keyboard and 
redirects it as midi. This is to allow:
- a second keyboard to be used as a midi control
- switching the system keyboard back and forth between normal and midi 
controler
- using a potion of the system keyboard as a midi controler (the numeric 
pad for example)

The advantage of this over keyboard short cuts is that this will work the 
same no matter what the desktop focus may be.

I am (as many people do) writing this for my own use, but will make it 
available for others who may have similar needs.

My question:
Where and how is the best place to put the MIDI port?
My first thought was to get it to create a jack midi port as this would be 
the most direct. The problems I see with this are, 1) my program will run 
as a different user than Jackd, 2) my program will run before and perhaps 
after jackd.

SO then I thought I guess I have to use ALSA for my midi port. I need to 
know if I do this, will jackd that is running a different backend than 
alsa (firewire for example) still see the alsa midi ports? I am guessing 
that a2jmidid would still work in any case, but not everyone uses that.

Assuming I have to use alsa midi (unless some one can suggest how to make 
this work with jack midi), I have noticed that some aplications that use 
alsa midi do not leave a visible port in alsa and do all connections 
internally which would be useless in this case. There are some examples of 
code at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/MIDI-HOWTO-9.html and I was wondering if 
this method will leave visible midi ports. I am also noticing it 2004 ish, 
is the info still valid, or is there a better place to look?

The keyboard input and grabbing will be based on the code from actkbd as 
it seems to already do all that stuff and is gpl2 (and besides the code 
looks understandable to me)

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net