[LAU] MIDI Input of LAU Applications

Crypto crptdngl71 at gmx.net
Mon May 18 10:03:12 EDT 2009


On Monday, 18 Mai 2009 15:40:42 Paul Davis wrote:
> On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 5:36 AM, Crypto <crptdngl71 at gmx.net> wrote:
> > What I would like to do in a first place is "simply" control  MIDI
> > applications that run on my notebook via these MIDI messages. Or, if you
> > will say it like that: I need a MIDI link from my MIDI organ to the
> > applications running on my notebook. The commands are sent after
> > triggering/switching/moving the turning knobs/pushbuttons/drawbars.
>
> at LAC 2006 (? it could have been 2005 or even 2004) there was a
> presentation of an app that converted MIDI into X Events, allowing
> MIDI to be used to control any X Window application even if it did not
> use MIDI itself. i don't know if this app is still available, or how
> well it worked, though the demonstration certainly did. You could make
> MIDI trigger arbitrary buttons on the screen, move knobs, faders etc.
> i'm not much of an advocate of this kind of approach, but its worth
> being aware of.

That to me really sounds worth closer examination as it could really be the 
stuff I need.

>
> > Keykit has other things that still need resolving (I have found it cannot
> > yet handle more than one MIDI input on linux machines),
>
> this is not true. I (re)wrote the linux MIDI support in KeyKit
> specifically to support this. there is a readme file in the
> distribution about how to do it.

I understand that keykit is able to do that, and I was able to make keykit 
have two separate input ports as described in that readme file you mention 
above. But there is a problem if one out of several ports uses running state. 
Keykit then shows an error message that it expected a status byte but got data 
bytes instead. I wrote to keykit group about this, and Tim replied it is a 
problem of function src/fsm.c that does not take MIDI input port into account. 
He also suggested on maybe how to fix it, but he himself does not have the time 
to do that at the moment, and I at the moment cannot do that myself either 
(although it is probably rather simple to fix).

>
> > I was stuck by the fact that an otherwise great application like hydrogen
> > is unable to perform a simple thing such as playing a fill-in via MIDI,
> > although it offers plenty of ways to play all sorts of MIDI sequences (I
> > compare a fill- in to a sequence here). I know that hydrogen offers some
> > commands such as "start" and "stop", but that is not enough for what I
> > would like to do. hydrogen is like Edward Scissorhands without the human
> > hands he should have received. hydrogen could do it if it only had a more
> > advanced MIDI handling.
>
> I think you are totally confused about what Hydrogen wants to be.

Maybe hydrogen is not ment to be what I thought it is at the first place, but 
browsing the hydrogen forum I have found several postings asking about the 
same thing. They say, to put it short, this has to wait until v. 0.95 of 
hydrogen has arrived, as there are several major GUI changes planned. I'm 
actually looking forward to trying out that future version of hydrogen.

Kind regards,
Crypto.





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