[LAU] [ANN] Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard 0.1.0

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

On Sunday, August 31, 2008, Edward Tomasz Napierala wrote:
> On 0831T2033, David Baron wrote:
> > On the linux side, there is jack-keyboard which has two manuals and
> > everything
>
> Two and a half.  ;-)

The man page, the web site, and something else that counts as the half 
one? ;-)

Seriously, I think he talks using the church organ terminology to describe the 
four rows of keys mapped as notes in your jack-keyboard compared to vmpk, 
where the default (built-in) key map uses only the two lower rows, like 
vkeybd. Also like vkeybd, in vmpk the user can customize the alphanumeric 
layout mapping the upper rows of keys if he wish so. Some provided map 
layouts use all key rows. Being vkeybd (and vmpk) keyboard mappings 
configurable by the user, I find it surprising your claim that jack-keyboard 
has a "much better keyboard mapping", when it is hard-coded in the program. 
Flexibility is not desirable for you?

On the other hand, the key event handling code in vmpk may be not very 
time-efficient, and may be related to the observed delays. I will try to 
measure and optimize it, although I think this problem may be neglected 
compared to the big hardware problems of the alphanumeric keyboards that 
prevent some key combinations to be pressed together at all. Anyway, the 
piano keyboard emulators aren't real music instruments. Is anybody going to 
perform a real concert with one of them? 

> > you have and no latency. This uses jack-midi. (Jack-midi seems to disable
> > non- jack-midi programs right now so yours might be a better
> > alternative!)
>
> It shouldn't disable anything.  However, JACK MIDI programs won't connect
> to ALSA MIDI programs unless you run jackd with the "-X seq" option.

I agree. I've connected vmpk to jack-keyboard without problems using qjackctl, 
sending events from one program to the other in both directions. The problem 
reported by the user may be restricted to his computer, but without more 
details it is very difficult to help him to fix it.

Regards,
Pedro