31 Jul
2005
31 Jul
'05
12:15 a.m.
I think #2 might be the easy part. The external soundcanvas has a
button which will generate a "test" signal - this seems to come back
through and out the speakers just fine. Seems to be "Line" on the
Alsamixer.
Perhaps ALSA is not seeing the port through which the MIDI signal needs
to go through to the external module? Your example of aconnect -o
showed a Midi Through port - mine does not show.
Minor fix or fundamental problem? Thinking the latter, as
[type=kernel] sounds like something fundamental to the OS I am guessing.....
thanks to all for the suggestions - at least it is narrowed down to some
"might work / should work" and "won't work" answers.
Phil J.
This is actual much harder to describe. It
depends on the
intimate and ugly details of your Soundscape's builtin
h/w mixer, and without access to it, it will be hard
to describe what you need to do. Every h/w mixer in every
card is different, despite the presence of a few
"standards" for such things.
What you will need is an ALSA program to manipulate the
h/w mixer. I like alsamixer, which runs in a terminal
window; I like it because it shows me everything and
doesn't try to be all cute like a generic windows mixer app.
The goal is to identify which signal stream corresponds
to the output of the MIDI h/w synth, and select it
as the capture source (in alsamixer, done by moving
the "focus" to that mixer/signal stream, and pressing
the spacebar.
After that, every app that records from the soundscape
will be listening to the output from the MIDI synth.
If this all appears arcane and absurd, don't worry, it is.
The problem on linux is that we (generally) attempt to use generic tools
that are independent of the particular h/w installed. For very simple
things, this works well, but audio + MIDI interfaces really do not tend
to benefit from the current approach that has been taken, and it
requires a lot of knowledge on the part of the user to make sense of the
information that is presented.
--p