[LAD] MIDI-2-TCP, TCP-2-MIDI

[Len Ovens]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2018, Jonathan E. Brickman wrote:

> I need lossless JACK MIDI networking outside of JACK's built-in networking, and
> not multicast unless someone can tell me straightforwardly how to get multicast
> (qmidinet) to run within localhost as well as outside it. Thus I am thinking of
> trying my hand at using the Mido library to bridge JACK MIDI and TCP. I have
> never done this sort of coding before, programmatorially I am mostly a deep
> scripting guy, Python-heavy with a bunch of Bash on Linux, Powershell-heavy on
> Windows of late, with a pile of history on back in Perl on both and VBA on
> Windows. Anyone have hints...suggestions...alternatives...a best or better
> starting place? Right now I don't want the applets to do GUI at all, I just want
> them to sit quietly in xterms, on JACK servers, keeping connection, and passing
> MIDI data to and fro, as other processes and devices bring it.

While I have not had any issues with qmidinet, it is not immune to packet 
loss. If you want a place to start I would suggest rtpMIDI would do what 
you want and be a great service to the linux community. While there have 
been in the past rtpmidi implementations in Linux, they seem to have 
suffered bitrot and in fact I don't even know if the source is still 
available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTP-MIDI#Linux

They mention Scenic, but anything I tried with that (like building from 
source) did not work. (it has been 1 or 2 years since I tried) The full 
implementation at least guarantees all note off events make it through. 
There was a google repo called MIDIKIT, but google has shut all that stuff 
down. I don't know if https://github.com/jpommerening/midikit is the same 
code or not as they have no readme and the last commit is 2015.

I don't know as I like to use node, but: 
https://github.com/jdachtera/node-rtpmidi
is a bit newer.

rtpmidi that shows up in alsa or jack with zeroconf support would be a 
nice addition to Linux audio. (as would a whole pile of other things :)


--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net