[linux-audio-user] External Midi through Alsa from Wine

[Brent Busby]

I have a lot of old analog and early digital synths.  Many of them have 
had little sysex programs written for them in DOS and Win16 formats by 
various people here and there who, by now, may have forgotten that they 
ever wrote them, programs which are made to do neat things with sysex to 
some particular model of old synth.  There are a lot of little DOS and 
Win16 programs out there like that.

So, since programs like that are still useful even if you have something 
like JSynthLib around, I've been trying to get Alsa Midi working in both 
directions under Wine.  Midi Out seems to be the easy part, as from what 
I've gathered from my own experiments and from articles on the Net, that 
has been working since some fairly old versions of Wine.  However...

I'm currently trying to get the Win16 program often seen online as 
ESQ135.ZIP or ESQ138.ZIP to work.  It appears completely functional, and 
it even sees my Delta 1010 through Alsa with no special configuration. 
However, when I try to select the Delta for Midi _IN_, the program 
freezes for several seconds, then finally _seems_ to take the setting as 
though it had to think about it but finally did take it...and then the 
entire Wine process freezes hard enough that it can only be terminated 
with a kill -9.

There seem to be some people on the Net who are actually using Windows 
sequencers (!) with Wine, so this can't be _that_ impossible, or at 
least I wouldn't think so with that being the case.  A sequencer 
certainly should want Midi in both directions.  The programs I'm trying 
to run are much simpler -- just little machine-specific sysex tools, 
which never exploit much more of the Microsoft API than you'd find in 
DOS or Windows 3.1.

Is anyone here doing something like this?  What is needed to get Midi 
talking to Wine?  The Delta 1010 does show up in both the IN and the OUT 
pulldowns -- it simply freezes if I try to select it in the IN one. 
(Interestingly, the Delta comes up _already_ selected on the OUT 
interface...hmm.)  I've already googled this quite a bit...responses 
vary from "it's impossible because Wine doesn't support Midi IN" to "it 
works but you need to add a special undocumented registry key to the 
Wine registry" to "I'm using Windows sequencers and I'm not having any 
problem."  How interesting!  For what it's worth, I've tried Debian 
sarge's Wine package version 0.0.20050310-1.2 (old, old, old...), and 
I'm currently running a hand-compiled install of the latest stable 0.9.7 
(which is very nice running most non-midi stuff I've thrown at it!). 
They both behave the same with ESQ135.EXE.

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby,   UNIX Systems Admin	 +   "It's like being	+
+ James Franck / Enrico Fermi Institute	 +    blindsided by a	+
+     The University of Chicago		 +    flying dwarf..."	+