Re: [LAU] MIDI over wifi on Linux, revisited

On Mon, January 4, 2016 6:49 pm, Jonathan E. Brickman wrote: You're jumping through hoops to get WiFi to work because you want a connector saver? Wait, I thought this was about MIDI. Is it MIDI, or USB? Or MIDI data which is being generated by a USB connected device? Anyway, connector saver is what we called an adapter to be used in situations where a connector was going to be mated much more than designed for. For example, say you are worried about wearing out the USB connector on your laptop. You make a cable that connects to the laptop, with a USB A female on the other end (extension cable, in other words). Make a way to keep the cable attached permanently to the laptop (tricky since the connector sticks out). Say for example the connector can tolerate 500 mating cycles, so previously you would wear out the laptop connector after 500 times of connecting and disconnecting your device. Now with the extension mounted, the end of the extension wears out after 500 times, so you get a new one, that is 2 mating cycles for the computer. After 500 more times of connecting and removing your device the cable wears out again, so you change it, 3 cycles on the laptop. This way you can get 500*500=250 000 mating cycles before you wear out the connector on the laptop. Of course for a portable system it isn't quite so simple, since the connector sticks out, so you can't really carry around something like a permanently attached extension cable without risking breaking the connector by bumping into something. The technique is more useful for something fixed, say you have a computer on work bench in a repair shop that you use to test out devices, so you are inserting and removing a lot more than usual. I don't remember if you said what was at each end of the wireless connection. Will that be a computer running Linux at both ends, or only at one end? I didn't hear anyone mention it before, but the rtp-MIDI specification says you can run over TCP, which should take care of most packet loss issues, although the variable latency of WiFi would still make it not recommended for real time use. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4695 The scenic tools mentioned earlier implement rtp-MIDI, but I don't have any idea whether it supports all the options to allow you to pick that you want TCP rather than UDP transport of the RTP packets. -- Chris Caudle