[LAU] Re: Still rather confused about Pipewire an interesting midi twists

On 04/01/2024 21:46, Lorenzo Sutton wrote: > Hi list and happy 2024! > > I am running Manjaro (an Arch-based distro). It seems now I have a > 'pipewire' package installed, but also pulseaudio. I don't think I > have actively tried to install 'pipewire' but maybe it's a dependency > for 'something'? > > Anyways, my current audio set-up is still as it has been for quite a > while on my laptop: > > - pulseaudio for 'eveyday' > > - jack for audio stuff and software (with a still working script I > start only when needed to have a pulseaudio 'sink' - e.g. running jack > and wanting to play audio or video from the browser) > > All of this works as expected and I am still rather unaware of the > pipewire intricacies and configurations. > > One thing I have noticed is that now it seems that alsa midi ports are > exposed as jack midi ports as well. Meaning... if I start some > notoriously ALSA-MIDI-only applications such as Rosegarden, Pure Data > or Qtractor their midi Outputs are shown in QJackCtl in the MIDI (i.e. > JACK MIDI) section and are also visible in notoriously JACK-MIDI-only > applications like Ardour or Carla, albeit without their port names > (Carla puts everything in 'System' and calls the various ports > 'midi_capture_1', 'midi_capture_2' etc. regardless of application, > Ardour puts everything under 'system' and then does distinguish > applications if set to 'show individual ports' but just lists # ports > without their names, QJackCtl lists the applications and then for each > lists ports as 'midi/playback1', 'midi/playback2' etc.) > > The most interesting aspect is that besides the naming quirk these > ports seem to work meaning that connecting rosegarden to, say, an > Ardour MIDI track with a plugin will make noise. That is without going > through a2jmidid. a2midid actually works pretty well so I'm not sure > what the 'real' advantage would be, but it's still something > interesting IMHO. > > Lorenzo