Does anyone compose music using any of theportsfromthe/ports/audio collection in FreeBSD?

[Dmitriy Startsev]

Hello, 4Front!
You wrote to <freebsd-multimedia at freebsd.org> on Wed, 14 Jul 2004
13:51:44 -0700:

 FT> We have some work to do in the MIDI Sequencer space. We plan to address
 FT> this and we'll be happy to share our work with FreeBSD developers. Just
 FT> that right now, we see that MIDI isn't important for music creation.
 FT> Companies like MAudio are more focussed on pro audio than MIDI. The
 FT> M-Audio Revolution 7.1 audio card doesn't even have a MIDI port.

These companies don't create music, they create audio hardware (and
software), and they focus on whatever is more profitable for them.
Particularly M-Audio Rev.7.1 is not a professional audio card.
MIDI is *very* important for music creation, I can tell this for sure as I
know a lot of musicians. Too bad commercial project developers sometimes
don't care about real people's needs:(

 FT> We do plan on doing proper ALSA emulation for audio and MIDI by
 FT> completely rewriting the ALSA Libraries to use OSS rather than ALSA
 FT> lowlevel drivers.  It can be done, just a whole lot of work is needed.
 FT> It's a better approach than using the Cuckoo concept because ALSA keeps
 FT> changing internally and the only thing relatively stable would be the
 FT> ALSA libraries. I hope that we have the time and man power to pull this
 FT> off.

Good news, this will allow more software to run under FreeBSD.

With best regards, Dmitriy Startsev.