On Wed, 2011-12-28 at 10:46 -0800, Iain Duncan wrote: Alsa ports will show up in jack if you use the -X option to the alsa driver, or the separate application a2jmidid. I recommend using the Jack API entirely. -dr

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Iain Duncan &lt;iainduncanlists(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Dave mentioned that you want to use the Jack API entirely, I think he probably meant that on Linux you can safely rely in having an access method that just takes MIDI from Jack - then converts to whatever messaging you want within your app. I may be wrong. The issue is that you put in that extremely awkward caveat which was "easy to port to other systems". I would not really want to have my whole source code having a line like #include <jack/midiport.h> to work. Even if that line is in a private, global header file it implies the code is dependent and that reduces portability. If you want maximum portability you probably need to create your own internal event messaging format and have raw MIDI, ALSA MIDI, Jack MIDI (or OSC, or Portmidi, etc) map into it using libraries. It is a bit more work but fortunately there is a reasonable amount of commonality in the external formats so your library will mostly be concerned with what is the access method to those data formats rather than the format itself. Not sure if that answers your question. You asked what was the easiest way. The easiest way is get somebody else do to it but I think your own your own here? The main thing you want to avoid is that when you pass these 'musical event' messages around your application that you are relying on a format from somebody else' library since if you try and port that over to another system you will have a dependency on what might be a non-native interface on that other system. If you are going to support lots of different interfaces then you get into some really enjoyable special cases. For example, when MIDI is not delivered into the RT audio thread you need a ringbuffer to send at least some of the messages to that thread. Conversely when you use Jack you have to decide which messages are not really for the RT thread and throw them the other way on another such ringbuffer. When you talk about having multiple MIDI interfaces you will be directly affect by these issues at the same time. Hm, there might not actually be an answer to this question since you put in that damn caveat - you don't actually seem to want a Jack application. Have fun. Or, if you can, get somebody else to have that 'fun' for you. Kind regards, nick. "we have to make sure the old choice [Windows] doesn't disappear”. Jim Wong, president of IT products, Acer Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:46:29 -0800 From: iainduncanlists(a)gmail.com To: linux-audio-dev(a)lists.linuxaudio.org Subject: [LAD] handling midi input in a jack app? Hey folks, what is the easiest way to deal with midi input in a jack app? I'm confused by the difference in jack midi and alsa midi, because I have two midi inputs, one is a usb input, so it appears at a low level as an alsa device, but the other is the midi input on a firewire unit, and it appears as a jack midi device. I'd like to make sure that whatever I do is easy to port to other systems. Does it make sense to use portmidi or rtmidi to get input or should I stick to the jack api entirely? thanksIain _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list Linux-audio-dev(a)lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-dev