[LAU] Bridging alsa and jack midi

[Philipp Überbacher]

Hi again,

what is currently the best (least jitter, reliable) way to bridge alsa
and jack midi?

The goal is rather simple, I want to be able to use my e-piano
(connected through USB) to play aeolus. Or rather allow a friend of
mine who actually knows how to play church organ to play it.

The keyboard shows up as alsa midi device while aeolus requires jack
midi input. It seems that aeolus can use alsa midi when run with the -A
option.

I got it to work somewhat using 'a2jmidi -e' but it turned out to be
rather unreliable. When I ran jack with a rather low latency setting
and got the first xrun a2jmidid crashed. Yes, xruns shouldn't happen
and there are some more thing I could do to avoid them, but programs
still shouldn't crash once an xrun occurs.

I also seem to remember that there's a better way to do this in the
meantime, however, the recently posted guide still only mentions
a2jmidid: http://lsn.ponderworthy.com/doku.php/audio_with_midi_on_linux

On a sidenote:
A rather funky thing that I noticed when playing with this is that
patchage (1.0.0) reliably segfaults as soon as I shut down aeolus
(0.9.0). I'm not sure which program is at fault, maybe one of you knows
so that I can file a proper bug report at the right place.

Regards,
Philipp