Subject: Re: [linux-audio-user] restricting MIDI channels
From: Florian Schmidt (mista.tapas_AT_gmx.net)
Date: Tue Apr 06 2004 - 11:53:43 EEST
On Tue, 6 Apr 2004 10:29:55 +0200
Frank Barknecht <fbar_AT_footils.org> wrote:
> Hallo,
> Mark Knecht hat gesagt: // Mark Knecht wrote:
>
> > Wouldn't it be a nice feature in kaconnnect or qjackctl to one day
> > add MIDI filtering?
>
> There are various ways to do midi filtering already. Matthias Nagorni
> wrote a tool for that whose name I don't remember currently, and it's
> very easy to create even complex filtering rules in Pd/jMax.
>
> Personally I don't think this belongs into a patch bay.
Midi tradition is that a device decides itself for which channel
messages it wants to listen. Every external midi device [except for very
old ones] i had under my fingers had some sort of mechanism to specify
which channels to listen to..
The reason for this is in the nature of normal external midi setups. It
is very common to hook up more than 2 instruments [though there is an
upper imit because of latencies] to a single midi port.. All midi
devices get the same midi stream so now they need to know which data is
for which device. This is done via the channels.
Breaking this concept would confuse many musicians, i suppose.. I know
in the case of internal midi routing with ALSA where you have
point2point connections between midi apps this doesn't relly make sense
anymore, because usually every midi app just gets the data it needs.
But still in the case of a dedicated computer that only runs softsynths
and has a single midi interface which is connected to a sequencer [be it
an external one or another computer] the channel selection method again
makes very much sense..
It is just part of how midi works..
Flo
-- kT
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