On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 21:47 -0500, PhilJackson wrote:
> >>Thanks for confirming that. How doI make it route the MIDI
> >>through the soundcard to the soundcanvas (and then back
> >>into the card to be played as audio)?
> >
> Ok thanks. I fired up qjackctl and haven't the foggiest idea what to
> do with it. Sorry -Windows user and quite unfamiliar. I don't know
> Jack about Jack. The task at hand is probably quite simple for the old
> hands but I haven't a clue.
not suprising that you'd find it confusing. it is confusing.
1) sending MIDI to a h/w synth on a souncard
a) you need to find out which ALSA sequencer port is representing
the synth. the simplest way to find out is from the command line
with the command:
aconnect -o
the output should give you some clue about a pair of numbers
to use that correspond to your soundcanvas. For example:
---- output from aconnect -o on my system -------
client 0: 'System' [type=kernel]
0 'Timer '
1 'Announce '
client 62: 'Midi Through' [type=kernel]
0 'Midi Through Port-0'
client 72: ' MIDI 1' [type=kernel]
0 ' MIDI 1 '
32 ' MIDI 2 '
--------------------------------------------------
that third client, mysteriously enough, is an RME HDSP
with 2 h/w MIDI ports. the first h/w port would be
sequencer port 72:0, the second 72:32.
the pattern is: <client ID>:<port ID>
b) then get hold of pmidi, a nice command line tool
for sending MIDI to an ALSA sequencer port. use this
command to do what you want:
pmidi -p <clientID>:<portID> yourmidifile.mid
changing the values of <clientID>, <portID> and the name
of the file to something more appropriate, such as
pmidi -p 72:0 bach_tocatta_and_fugue.mid
2) getting audio back
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
