Building an ALSA pipeline out of software that insists on outputting to a real MIDI port
Recently I've had a problem for which there was no readily available answer on Google. If you found this through a web search, I hope the following will be of help. I have to stress, however, that my understanding of ALSA is quite superficial, and the solution that is presented here may have worked for the wrong reasons.
What I was trying to do, was to do keyjazz on vkeybd, feed the MIDI events into QMidiArp (an arpeggiator), and use the arpeggiated sequence as input to Alsa Modular Synthesizer (Ingen seems to be more powerful and easier to use, but it has some... issues, that prevent me from running it successfully).
QMidiArp seems to be the software arpeggiator on Linux, but unfortunately, it wants to talk to ALSA MIDI interfaces. That is, it will only transmit events to /snd/seq or whatever, where an actual hardware synthesizer should be connected. Patchage shows no output streams that can be subscribed on QMidiArp, only the input (which can easily be connected to vkeyb).
It was part 10 of the Linux MIDI howto that spurred me on to a solution. There is a program called aconnectgui (available in the Debian/Ubuntu package of the same name) that, unlike Patchage, will show you the outputs that correspond to hardware devices. Just start it up (after you have started all the programs that will be in the pipeline), connect the output of vkeybd to the input of QMidiArp, connect the first output of QMidiArp (the one corresponding to ALSA port 0) to the input of ams, and there you go!
[Sunday, Mar 23, 2008 @ 14:11] | [tech] | # | G
