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I'm having big troubles getting my MIDI devices to work... Been trying
for days, but no luck.
I have a Soundblaster Live! with builtin midi support, and a Kawai
keyboard with usb midi jack. I'm using kernel 2.6, KDE and alsa. I load
usb-midi as kernel module, and setup alsa according to the docs for the
Soundblaster. Sound works fine, BUT:

- SB MIDI doesn't play at all. It is still visible at the Sounds control
center, but Test Midi doesn't work, and whenever I play a midi I get no
sound. I 'd love to use the internal midi, but I bypassed that by using
timidity. With its software midi, i can at least listen to files.
- There's no way to see the USB MIDI. I know it is connected, because
Info Center / USB Devices shows USB-MIDI: Kawai Musical Instruments etc,
but neither aplaymidi -l nor rosegarden see that.

Any help? This is driving me crazy.

List of devices:

bash-2.05b$ aplaymidi -l
Port Client name Port name
64:0 EMU10K1 MPU-401 (UART) EMU10K1 MPU-401 (UART)
65:0 Emu10k1 WaveTable Emu10k1 Port 0
65:1 Emu10k1 WaveTable Emu10k1 Port 1
65:2 Emu10k1 WaveTable Emu10k1 Port 2
65:3 Emu10k1 WaveTable Emu10k1 Port 3
128:0 TiMidity TiMidity port 0
128:1 TiMidity TiMidity port 1
128:2 TiMidity TiMidity port 2
128:3 TiMidity TiMidity port 3

--------------
Contents of /etc/modules.d/alsa:

options snd device_mode=0666
alias snd-card-0 snd-emu10k1
alias sound-slot-0 snd-emu10k1

---------------
Contents of /proc/asound/oss/sndstat


Sound Driver:3.8.1a-980706 (ALSA v1.0.7 emulation code)
Kernel: Linux tero 2.6.9-gentoo-r9 #3 SMP Tue Dec 21 16:52:40 EET 2004 i686
Config options: 0

Installed drivers:
Type 10: ALSA emulation

Card config:
Sound Blaster Live! (rev.8) at 0xa000, irq 21

Audio devices:
0: EMU10K1 (DUPLEX)

Synth devices:
0: Emu10k1

Midi devices: NOT ENABLED IN CONFIG

Timers:
7: system timer

Mixers:
0: TriTech TR28602

On Tue, 2004-12-21 at 20:11 +0200, xenofon wrote:
> I'm having big troubles getting my MIDI devices to work... Been trying
> for days, but no luck.
> I have a Soundblaster Live! with builtin midi support, and a Kawai
> keyboard with usb midi jack. I'm using kernel 2.6, KDE and alsa. I load
> usb-midi as kernel module, and setup alsa according to the docs for the
> Soundblaster. Sound works fine, BUT:
>
> - SB MIDI doesn't play at all. It is still visible at the Sounds control
> center, but Test Midi doesn't work, and whenever I play a midi I get no
> sound. I 'd love to use the internal midi, but I bypassed that by using
> timidity. With its software midi, i can at least listen to files.
> - There's no way to see the USB MIDI. I know it is connected, because
> Info Center / USB Devices shows USB-MIDI: Kawai Musical Instruments etc,
> but neither aplaymidi -l nor rosegarden see that.
>
> Any help? This is driving me crazy.
>

I am working on something similar. I wanted to get Rosegarden to work,
which I highly recommend if you are doing music on Linux. I asked their
mailing list and got one of the best responses I've ever seen on a
mailing list. It is pasted below. Follow the links, especially the one
to the rosegarden docs. The guy who wrote it has the same sound card as
you so the docs are good in that respect. Good luck.

John

On Wednesday 22 December 2004 02:58, John Russell wrote:
> This is my first message to the mailing list and let me start by
> saying how amazed I am with rosegarden. Truly fantastic. The
> notation view is great. All the midi tools, I can't wait to get
> started. The only issue is, I can't get it to make a sound.
>

First problem -- does your soundcard have a native synth (SBAWE
Wavetable
style.or even the ugly ol' adlib emulation)?... Apparently most of the
newer
cheap an' dirty PCI cards have none. even es1371 has none (even though
it
unexplainably shows up as a midi device) -- which is what I have. If you
you
do have a wavetable card you have to load it with soundfonts -- sfxload
or
asfxload is you friend there.

If you haven't got a native synth, you can load a program called
fluidsynth,
which shows up as a alsa midi device, which works great if you have
enough
RAM and you have to get soundfonts to load into that program.

You can also load timidity (another memory hog) in such a way as it also
can
show up like an alsa midi device > <timidity -iA -Os> - it's got all
of its
own soundfonts

(the above 2 are by far the easiest to start out with)

Finally (I think)
If you can get jack running properly you can get 'dssi' plugins
available as
selectable instruments as 'Synth Plugins'


> I am running Rosegarden 0.9.91 on Gentoo. I have it set to start up
> jack at startup as I have never used jack for anything before. The
> command Rosegarden is using is
>
> /usr/bin/jackd -d alsa -d hw -r 44100 -p 2048 -n 2
>
> which makes jack output
>

If I were you I wouldn't let Rosegarden start jack but rather qjackctl.
you
can tune jack settings from inside the 'setup' dialogue. xruns are a
problem
relating to the resources of your machine. the more ram and speed you've
got
the more 'low latency' -- somewhat analogous to 'realtime' -- you can
set
jack to be. the slower and more ram-strapped, the larger numbers of
bigger
buffers you have to set up for jack to use to prevent 'xruns' (hiccups)
high
latency means you have to wait for jack and it will give you wierd
sounding
pauses. qjackctl setup gives you a helpful 'latency' value that will
help
you with trading off between high in the blue sky performance and rubber
meets the road functionality

qjackctl also has a nifty audio connect dialoge which amazingly lets you
pipe
output from various jack enabled audio apps into the input of other
ones.
Really nifty.

If you can recompile the kernel with security capabilities as a module,
you
can compile and load a security module that allows jack to be realtime
-- and
that improves things significantly (except that jack now has the power
to
hang your system completely -- caveat emptor -- anyone have the latin
for
'let the installer beware?' -caveat installator? )

http://jackit.sourceforge.net/

look at the FAQ -- it explains about the realtime module...

http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tu...chapter-0.html

are very useful links

Have lots of fun!!!

Thanks, that site helped a lot. To get it to work, I had to do 2 things:

- Use the kernel drivers... alsa-drivers package didn't seem to enable midi
- Don't load snd-usb-audio at automodules.... Instead, load it after
everything else has loaded.

Thanks