MIDI input device

Hans Petter Selasky hselasky at c2i.net
Sun Dec 21 21:49:06 UTC 2008


On Sunday 21 December 2008, Tore Lund wrote:
> Asking about MIDI here may be somewhat like flogging an absent horse.
> There seems to be little if any information on mailing lists and other
> forums about MIDI, so I have to ask:  Does MIDI input work at all on
> FreeBSD?  And if so, with what sort of MIDI interface?
>

Hi,

I have used FreeBSD-current (USB2) with an external USB MIDI adapter and 
several MIDI devices.

The current USB2 MIDI solution is not well integrated into the FreeBSD MIDI 
system. What you get is a raw device to get/put MIDI commands. This basically 
works, but not with all MIDI applications.

Depending on where you are living in Norway I can give you a personal demo :-) 
Hence I like playing the piano and recording using MIDI ...

--HPS

> I wanted to try out the software synths available on FreeBSD.  So I dug
> out my old Roland A30 keyboard and my SoundBlaster PCI64 card, which is
> based on Ensoniq 1370 and which has a game/MIDI port.  The sound card is
> recognized all right by FreeBSD, but not the MIDI port - doing a "cat
> /dev/midistat" gives me "No devices installed".
>
> It occurred to me that I should try out the rest of the synthesizer
> software before going any further.  Hence I installed jack-keyboard and
> some of the necessary infrastructure.  Following the documentation, I
> first ran "jackd -d oss", then "ghostess whysynth.so" and then
> "jack-keyboard".  This setup works very well - makes me look forward to
> trying out other synth stuff in /usr/ports/audio.
>
> But I need a real keyboard in order to play music.  Am I missing some
> command or configuration that will recognize my MIDI port as an input
> device?  Or, if my old SoundBlaster cannot be used, will FreeBSD pick up
> any of the new USB interfaces?  Thanks for any hints.




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