FWIW apart from jack audio, there are also jack and ALSA midi available. AFAIK when for example using two TerraTec EWX 24/96 PCI cards as MIDI interfaces, there is no way at all to restore MIDI connections automatically. The only way is to do all MIDI IO connections with those cards manually. Even changing the name of at least one card, does only affect audio, the MIDI names of identical PCI cards are always the same. -- pacman -Q linux{,-rt{-securityink,-cornflower,,-pussytoes}}|cut -d\ -f2 4.20.5.arch1-1 4.19.15_rt12-0 4.19.13_rt10-0 4.19.10_rt8-0 4.18.16_rt9-1

On Mon, January 28, 2019 10:42 am, Chris Caudle wrote: Sorry, a little bit of bad form to reply to my own post instead of just including this in the first message, but I did not think to look up the URL before I hit send. In case you have not found these links already: This is the definition of the metadata API: http://jackaudio.org/api/group__Metadata.html The top level links to the API documentation: http://jackaudio.org/api/index.html Possibly the session API may be of use as well, I am not really familiar with session tools. It seems like possibly they could do what you want, but there was a lot of churn for a while, and it seemed like there was never a consensus which developed fully around multi-application session store and restore. Have you investigated something like ladish to see if it can restore the connections like you want? Or maybe I have misunderstood your end goal. -- Chris Caudle

Apologies all, and Chris, new to responding to mailing lists, accidentally responded directly to Chris Here follows the thread so far: I thought about the metadata system, which i thought i had read had recently been included in 2? but i wouldnt be able to rely on jack-matchmakers port regex matching to automatically connect these group aliased ports to appropriately named ardour buses, necessitating me to write my own auto connect daemon with its own matching logic, possibly involving assigning meta data to ardours ports as well. I felt adjusting the alias functionality to remove the, surprising to me atleast, two alias limit, was the easier route that i could perhaps then contribute to the project. If it turns out this patch is unincludable, or metadata or is simply ultimately the better way to achieve this, I'll be happy to maintain this patch locally until I can get around to writing or finding the tooling I would need. or if there is something already existing that I have missed On Jan 28, 2019 12:19 PM, Chris Caudle wrote: It is primarily ports that are not always available or may disappear at any time. VCV Rack and netjack workers primarily. which i would like to group into mono, stereo, surround etc pairs. I have these things autoconnecting to ardour buses which are distributed to tracks, so that I dont need to remember to reconnect them to every track. The workflow I have now is something like, name an ardour bus, run the group command over the desired ports, and issue a reload to jack-matchmaker(as it doesnt monitor port aliasing). Admittedly, the limit does not much get in the way of this, its not likely I will desire to add a port to more than one group, but i would certainly like the ability, perhaps for creating weird stereo images out of vcv, but the limit, considering it is global for both port owners and non, feels tight, and could cause surprises/cognitive overhead for me when say, switching between grouping schemes Additionally Chris mentioned the session api, and ladish, in a follow up message to their own, which I forgot to address. Perhaps a session system could do what I need/better address my needs, I'll admit it's something I need to look into better, it hadnt occurred to me at the point where I felt the need to patch jack to enable more aliases, but I figure now that i've done the work, why not see if the jack team desires it.