From alsa-devel-owner@alsa.jcu.cz  Sat Feb  6 01:02:51 1999
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Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 16:01:13 -0800 (PST)
From: R Pickett <emerson@hayseed.net>
To: Frank van de Pol <frank@vande-pol.demon.nl>
cc: alsa-devel@alsa.jcu.cz
Subject: Re: Writing Article Re: Linux audio;  also have new hardware support
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On Sat, 6 Feb 1999, Frank van de Pol wrote:

> [snip explanation]
> This 'address space' allows us to address up to about a million distinct
> MIDI channels. For example a driver for the Opcode Studio V you mentioned could
> address a whole stack of 16 of those devices, giving a total of 256 midi
> ports (=4096 channels!!!).

Gottit.  I hadn't dug into ALSA stuff very deeply yet (I only have about 3K
words to discuss the ENTIRE state of Linux music software, so ALSA gets about
60 of those....), so this was unclear to me.  Thanks for the clarification.

> The channel / device management like on Apple Macs you mentioned in your
> example is indeed very important for pro work, especially if one has a
> complex or big MIDI configuration. This is application specific work, but
> some kind of standard or a library might help here. Unfortunate these kind
> of stuff is almost nonexisting for other platforms than Apple... For the
> time being a end-user application (like a sequencer app) wil have to provide
> facilities for that. Simply 'Naming" individual channels might already be
> enough for most users.

Naming individual channels would be a good thing;  this is also true in the
audio realm in pro audio, where you might have a PCI card that supplies 8
analog ins and outs, and, for example, a USB interface with S/PDIF, and
another PCI card with ADAT lightpipe.  Having those all show up as /dev/dsp1 -
/dev/dsp18 would be annoying at best.

That is, it makes sense from a compatibility standpoint to have them show up as
those, but having some kind of user- level scheme (or even built into the
driver, so you query /dev/dsp14 to find out what nice description it has for
itself) for user software to find out something more friendly, would be a plus.

I talked to various folks at NAMM who are mulling plans for user-space MIDI
and audio 'middleware' like this.  Hopefully look for announcements sometime
soonish, but for this second, I can't say more than that, sigh.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
R Pickett                Look around you. This is what the world
emerson@hayseed.net      looks like at the end of the millenium.
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