Re: [LAD] making sense of Jack MIDI; or, is this an appropriate use for Jack?

On Friday 15 February 2013 15:22:20 Paul Davis wrote: I suppose I've been spoiled by the Qt documentation. There are overviews for each framework, and each class and method have significant explanatory documentation, often including a sample of how to use it. The examples are well-documented, take you by the hand, and walk you through exactly what's going on at each line (or small group of lines). I find the Jack documentation much harder to follow. The refman opens with some broad explanations of what Jack is, then goes on to give short descriptions of each function and data type. There's no "here's how you use these guys" sections. Some of the Jack example files are commented and some aren't. There's also no expanded tutorial that takes you step by step from something completely trivial to a simple but functional program (e.g. Qt's tutorial, Scribble, if I recall). I don't mean to denigrate the documentation that's there, but it's missing something. It's like a bunch of disconnected man pages. It's okay if you already know how to use it, but it's very hard for the newbie. The Alsa documentation suffers from this as well. It's kind of like taking a calculus textbook and jumbling all the pages. You'd have hunt and peck through this page and that for a very long time before you could understand anything. For parsing an SMF, you mean something like code that can convert midi to text and back again? I've written a couple of converters to do that sort of thing. In the program, each midi track is a list of events with absolute times. Merging the tracks together isn't a big deal, so then I'd have a single list of events with absolute times (in midi ticks). I also have the code to convert each event to a list of bytes (binary data), since I can write a SMF. And I have an algorithm to convert absolute ticks to nanoseconds. It's that messy sequencing stuff that's giving me the trouble. -- 7:8