[alsa-devel] proposed change to amidi: allow data from stdin

[Al Steffens]

ALSA Developers,

Proposed change to amidi:  allow data from stdin.

A simple addition to amidi to allow midi commands from standard input 
would facilitate a MIDI-over-IP setup in which amidi and netcat together 
could send/receive raw MIDI over a network, or the internet.  I'm 
thinking of something as simple as

nc host port | amidi -p hw:1,0

to receive raw midi from someone on the internet and pipe the midi 
commands to one of my tone generators.  This would further the effort to 
realize the "online jamming" idea with MIDI.

Currently, amidi will read raw MIDI commands from a file using the "-s" 
flag.  I have tried this with a named pipe, but amidi tries to get the 
file size causing an error.  Perhaps fixing this would be one solution.

Al Steffens
apsteffe at netwood.net