[LAU] Record / playback MIDI through MIDI <--> USB cable?

[Kevin Cole]

On Wed, Aug 21, 2019 at 7:38 AM Jeanette C. <julien at mail.upb.de> wrote:

> you can familiarise yourself with quite a few of the utilities without your
> keyboard. There are virtual keyboards, usiing either mouse or the computer
> keyboard, IIRC. With aconnect you can list ports and connect them or you use a
> graphical patchbay or MIDI router.

I think I have better luck / skill with an actual keyboard.  Trying to
bang chords out in anything approximating real-time using a mouse or
virtual keyboard seems awkward.

> You can play MIDI files to a software
> synthesizer like fluidsynth or qsynth (fluid with graphics). I think there's a
> general MIDI soundfont to load so you can mostly get the sound arrangement
> from your home keyboard.

I've used timidity for playing MIDI files I've downloaded from
elsewhere.  So that part's okay.

> Oh: your mio usb-MIDI cable should be automatically detected when plugged in,
> so no need to load anything special or reboot. If it behaves as all the other
> USB -> MIDI adaptors that I've seen, it will be listed with or without an
> attached keyboard or synthesizer.

Well, as I mentioned in the first message, that's "working" -- sort
of: I've already established that it sees the keyboard, and that I can
send and receive. It's just that I was trying to do it with the raw
/dev/ and assuming that the format of .mid files that I've downloaded
and played on the computer was a pure MIDI stream, and that just using
"cat" would send it to the synthesizer and play it back. Instead, it
played a lot of random noise on the synthesizer, rather than the
actual tunes I would hear with timidity. So, that means either (a) the
.mid files aren't raw MIDI, or (b) there's some other magic in the
communication protocol, e.g. baud, parity, headers, etc.  Or that was
my thinking.  And, when I tried the reverse, using "cat" to redirect
the output of the raw /dev/ to a file named play-me.mid, timidity
didn't play back what I did on the Yamaha.