Using a midi keyboard with FreeBSD (jack update, ardour3 alpha...)

[Juergen Lock]

Hi!

 So I was looking for midi software that could work with a midi
keyboard on an usb midi interface (snd_uaudio, /dev/umidi0.0), and
found that at least both rosegarden and musescore only know alsa seq
interfaces (which we don't have nor emulate on FreeBSD), not raw
midi (I'm not sure there's a difference between alsa raw midi and
oss raw midi)  I then found audio/lmms which appears to support
oss midi, but couldn't get it to work with my interface (and also
found it cannot export midi, only save in its own private fileformat.)
I even tried to update lmms to the latest release (I'd need to clean
that up before it would be ready for public consumption), but then...

 I found that the 3.0 alpha versions of Ardour...

	http://ardour.org/node/4532
	http://ardour.org/a3_features
	http://ardour.org/a3_features_midi
	http://ardour.org/a3_features_midi_editing
	http://www.archive.org/details/Introduction_to_Ardour_3.0_MIDI

...have grown midi support, _and_ ardour uses jack for both midi
output and input so I could use my keyboard with audio/jack_umidi.
Well, so now I have a first preliminary port of 3.0alpha10 svn
r10000:  (same revision as the Linux binaries on their site)

	http://people.freebsd.org/~nox/tmp/ardour-3.0alpha10-preliminary.patch

(apply on top of the current audio/ardour in the portstree)

 This needs a newer version of audio/jack so I updated that too:
(please test this update even if you don't use ardour or midi)

	http://people.freebsd.org/~nox/tmp/jack-0.120.1.patch

 TODO:

- Test (and possibly fix) the VST stuff (it uses wine and thus probably
  only works on i386 and I'm on amd64 so I didn't attempt to build it.)
- Fix the port so it respects C{,XX}FLAGS?  (it now uses waf which
  seems to ignore them.)
- Add slv2 support and test it (would at least need updating audio/slv2
  because ardour3 needs slv2 >= 0.6.4 .)
- More missing features?
- Add knob to build release version and/or strip the installed
  objects? (/usr/local/lib/ardour3 is currently 1.6G, the build
  dir work/ is 3.7G.  It appears tho you can run the build from
  below the work/ dir without installing it by invoking:

	work/ardour-3.0alpha10_10000/gtk2_ardour/ardev

  )
- Test!  (are the Ardour devs interested in FreeBSD bugreports?
  I don't know. :)  What I do know is they don't want the alphas
  discussed in their webforums, qoute:

-------snip-----------
This is an alpha version of Ardour 3.0.

You are respectfully requested NOT to ask for assistance with build issues
and not to report issues with Ardour 3.0 on the forums at ardour.org.

Please use IRC, the bug tracker and/or the ardour mailing lists (-dev or -user)

Thanks for your co-operation with our development process.
-------snip-----------

 Enjoy, :)
	Juergen

PS:  The export function in the gui doesn't work for midi tracks, but
you can fork a track and after that grab a midi file out of:

	<session dir>/interchange/<name>/midifiles