Hi there, I recently found this message regarding the alsa setup of a parallel port Midi Express XT when I was about to re-activate some old gear myself. So, I subscribed to this list and have to admit that I found a lot of interesting topics here in the last few days.. So, hello to everyone. Regarding the Midi Express XT.. I finally managed to load up the relevant alsa module when starting my (somewhat antique) desktop system which runs a recent Arch Linux setup. The followings things need to be taken care of: 1.) The relevant alsa module (snd-mtpav.ko) should come as a part of most 2.6-kernels. Under a Xubuntu 7.10 (which I use on a laptop) the module can be found in: /lib/modules/<kernel version>/kernel/sound/drivers So, most of the info found in http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Module-mtpav should not be relevant for setting up the interface. 2.) The parameters for the module can also be found here: http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/sound/alsa/ALSA-Configuration.txt Search for "snd-mtpav" in the text. The parameters "port" and "irq" need to be provided in order to correctly load the module where port refers to the address and irq to the irq (interrupt) which are configured for the parallel port the midi interface is connected to. For an on board parallel port these parameters should be configurable in the PC's BIOS. 3.) The module snd-mtpav will only be loaded if it may get complete control of the specified parallel port! This means that you should have a parallel port on your PC which will be exclusively used for this midi interface. Otherwise, you would need to manually load/unload relevant kernel modules. I think this is due to the way the module is programmed, but that this is not necessarily the only possible solution. For example, the module for the Portman 2x4 interface (snd-portman2x4) uses another way to gain access to the parallel port which seems to be more user-friendly if you want to connect another thing to the parallel port like a printer (if such devices still exist) at run-time... 4.) Regarding items 2.) and 3.) you need to do the following in order to set up the Midi Express XT: Find out how to load a module at system start up, and how to prevent the kernel from auto-loading some standard parallel port modules. In Arch Linux this is simply a matter of editing the "MODULES" line in /etc/rc.conf. For an Ubuntu-based distribution you should find a solution at the Ubuntu user's wiki, or in one of the numerous Ubuntu forums. You want to load the module snd-mtpav, but you do not want the kernel to automatically load the modules lp, parport, and parport_pc (at least, if you only have a single parallel port on your PC)! This way, snd-mtpav should get exclusive access to the parallel port. Additionally, the parameters for snd-mtpav need to be provided. In Arch Linux the relevant file is /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf. Under Ubuntu, I suppose you need to edit/create a file in /etc/modprobe.d/. The relevant info including the exact file name should be present in the user's wiki/forums too. On my system I added the following lines to modprobe.conf in order to determine a static "sound card" order, and the parameters for snd-mtpav: options snd-ice1712 index=0 options snd-mtpav port=0x278 irq=5 index=1 5.) Reboot your system and use the "dmesg" command in order to check the kernel startup messages. If all went well, it should include a line like "Motu MidiTimePiece on parallel port irq: 5 ioport: 0x278". Furthermore, "cat /proc/interrupts" should produce a line like "5: ... MOTU MTPAV". Hope, this helps in some way.. Kind regards, Daniel _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
