From alsa-devel-owner@alsa.jcu.cz  Sat Jan 23 19:02:14 1999
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Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1999 13:04:52 -0500 (EST)
From: Fred Floberg <emng@geocities.com>
To: frank@vande-pol.demon.nl
cc: alsa-devel@jcu.cz
Subject: Re: alsa midi player
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On Sat, 23 Jan 1999 frank@vande-pol.demon.nl wrote:

> Yep I know, but there are only very few OSS sequencer apps around (I guess
> less than 10). Of all those apps the sources are available, so source
> compatibility is no problem.
> 
> We only need someone who does the first port... I thought Fred Floberg was
> working on a port of Nathan Laredo's playmidi-2.3 package. Perhaps his work
> can be used as either a porting library or as guidline for porting "change
> xxx to yyy for note on events", "do this&that instead of blahblahbluh to set
> tempo and start playign" etc.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to do as much with playmidi as I had wanted to
for a number of reasons:

I don't have much documentation on the OSS sequencer API, aside from
soundcard.h, and not having much experience with midi hinders my understanding
of what's being done in playmidi.

playmidi has the capability of using not only an external midi port but also
internal synth hardware, so the code is not as straightforward as I had hoped.
The biggest problem though is the apparent lack of parallels between OSS's
API paradigm (from what I can gather) and ALSA's.

I've just picked up Isaku's 'widi' midi player in the hope of better
understanding the differences and likenesses of the two API's.

I'd really like to add real-time MIDI I/O to Csound using the ALSA sequencer
driver, so it's not like I've lost interest. I'm just stumped for the time
being.

I wonder if Nathan Loredo would be interested in adding ALSA sequencer
driver support to his playmidi program himself? Maybe I should write to
him.


Fred



