Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] patch MIDI apps together?
From: David Slomin (david.slomin_AT_av.com)
Date: Tue Apr 18 2000 - 18:15:15 EEST
Paul Winkler wrote:
>
> 1) Sequencers seem to rely on the soundcard driver for timing, which
> the FIFO can't provide.
There are two common ways of sending MIDI events. One is by
enqueing them via a sequencer device interface. A generic FIFO
cannot support this. The other way is by sending the events in
ASAP-quasi-realtime to a raw device interface. This latter works
perfectly with FIFOs in all cases.
Note that although there are many existing MIDI programs that can
only work with the queued sequencer style of interface, they are
inherently broken since they thus cannot talk to external
synthesizers. The ALSA sequencer interface is supposed to help
relax this restriction by layering a software sequencer on top of
the raw UART I/O for talking to external synths, but I'm not sure
if that code is stable yet.
> 2) application designers continue to present users with a limited
> selection of input/output devices so pipe tricks like that are
> disallowed.
This moronic restriction should really be fixed. Thank heavens
for open source which allows us to do so! Warning to writers of
new MIDI software: it's fine to enumerate all the known MIDI
devices if you want to make it easy for the user, but make
certain that you let them type in their own as well!
Div.
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