[LAU] Is -Xalsarawidi the same as -Xraw or -Xseq?

[Len Ovens]

On Tue, 19 Jun 2018, Victor A. Stoichita wrote:

>
> I just found this thread from 2014 about alsarawmidi [1]. At that 
> time the intention was apparently that alsarawmidi would replace 
> both 'seq' and 'raw' [2]. a2jmidid was described as pretty much 
> dead. Now the wheel of life has turned I guess. I don’t really get 
> the rest of that discussion.

Sometimes people are way too quick to call things dead. There is a thing 
called bitrot where changing lib versions kill older code. This is very 
true with code that uses a system GUI like QT or GTK (GCDMaster is a good 
example). However, in the case of very basic c utilities that really use 
an API that hasn't changed for years, just looking at the git repo and 
calling something dead because that last entry is a few years old doesn't 
mean anything.

That being said, there are two ways to run a2jmidid, from 
the command line as a2jmidid -e and through dbus with a2j_control. I would 
advise against using a2j_control as I have found it sometimes "jams" (I am 
sure there is a better word) and creates a disk filling log file in short 
order.

Do remember MIDI notes come at about 1khz (31k/10bits/3events) chords are 
groups of notes... depending on the keyboard scan direction your chord 
will always be top to bottom or bottem to top with the last delayed a few 
ms from the first. Beside that jitter has to be pretty low frequency to be 
an issue. Not that jitter is ok, but that MIDI itself is an issue already 
before it gets to the computer.

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net