[linux-audio-user] Can't get rosegarden4 to record from ALSA virmidi

[Larry Troxler]

Has anyone got rosegarden to record from an ALSA virmidi port?

I can't get it to work, and apparently nobody on the rosegarden list has tried 
it, so that so far, I have not got any answers there, probably because the 
developers are very busy with other things.. But I thought I'd ask here as 
well, because there may be some rosegarden users that aren't on their list, 
and I'm getting hungry to get this solved. I'm hesitant to submit a formal 
Rosegarden bug report just yet, because I could be misunderstanding something 
about the way virmidi works.

In case anyone's interested, Rosegarden is a sequencer app that uses the ALSA 
MIDI sequencer API.  What I'm trying to do is load a the virmidi device, and 
then aconnect 72:0 73:0 for example. Then I set up the record device in 
Rosegarden to record from 73:0, and set up a play track that plays on 72:0. 
Thus when I record, I would expect that events get recorded onto the record 
track, but it doesn't happen. I also can't record events to that track if I 
play them from PD, using the OSS compatilibilty interface, through a device 
that is symlinked to 72:0.

However, PD itself has no problems linking the two devices together - Through 
PD I can play through 72:0 and have PD receive the message back through 73:0.

It is entirely possible that I'm making some silly mistake, so that's why I 
ask here.  Can anyone suggest some other test to try? Is it possible that 
there is a bug in ALSA where using the sequencer API doesn't work when 
getting events from a virmidi device? Or is it more likely a bug in 
Rosegarden? I already tried making sure that Rosegarden seem to be opening 
the correct record device, by hardwiring this in the source code. What's left 
next for me to try, is opening the 73:0 device in record direction only 
(Rosegarden I beleive is opening it in duplex mode).

So, any thoughts? Is there some simpler application I could try as a sanity 
check, to see if my ALSA and virmidi are working?

Larry Troxler