FreeBSD Jack'd Up MIDI

[Matt Olander]

Hello FreeBSD-Multimedians!

I saw this question about FreeBSD w/MIDI in this thread:
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-multimedia/2016-October/017299.html

Actually, FreeBSD seems to make a pretty sweet Digital Audio Workstation these days and jackd/qjackctl and friends run well. It took me awhile to wire things up to the point where I had fluidsynth/qsynth actually making any noise inside Rosegarden or Ardour, but I had my guitar plugged in and was recording (with a mic for vocals on another track, ohmygosh, what!?) fairly quickly.

I have the same midi-keyboard controller as the original poster:
Akai MPK mini

My question is...how in the heck do I use it? Docs seem scarce for midi on FreeBSD (or ancient), so I'm hoping that it's something silly that I missed/skipped or overlooked.

When I plug it in:
ugen0.16: <AKAI PROFESSIONAL,LP> at usbus0
uaudio3: <AKAI PROFESSIONAL,LP MPK mini, class 0/0, rev 1.10/1.00, addr 17> on usbus0
uaudio3: No playback.
uaudio3: No recording.
uaudio3: MIDI sequencer.
uaudio3: No HID volume keys found.

..and a /dev/umidi3.0 device appears (yay!?). I think my Akai APC40 board is on umidi2.0.

FYI, I've also got Open Broadcasting Studio going & we setup a live-streaming nginx webserver and a janky webpage for streams, which all seems to work great, so hopefully we can do some streaming/jamming/interviewing at MeetBSD in Berkeley next week ;)

Can anyone point me in the right direction with this midi-madness?

I was going to give Ableton & a few Guitar apps a spin in Wine since gaming with PlayOnBSD ended up being so easy. If wine introduces too much latency, I've got a bhyve setup with passthrough on the card that works (I think?).

This particular boxen is:
FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE-p5 #0: Thu Jun 30 03:52:15 UTC 2016     root at amd64-builder.pcbsd.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC 

I've got an 11 and a CURRENT system, but getting jack & all the multimedia apps playing well together ended up being the path of lower resistance on 10.3.

If you're curious, here's a pic of my (trainwreck) home-office:
https://goo.gl/photos/n45C3gXd1apiGPMz9

Pardon the mess :D

Cheers,
-matto