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 > > > > > > >
