At Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:13:23 -0800, Josh Lehan wrote:

Hello.

Newbie question: I'm wondering about sending untimed MIDI data to the ALSA sequencer subsystem.

The application would be for a "beep"-like program, from the command line, that instead of making beeps, would play MIDI instruments to make better-sounding beeps.

I have TiMidity hooked up into ALSA, as a softsynth, and it works just fine for playing MIDI data sent to it by ALSA.

The "aplaymidi" command works for .MID files, and the "vkeybd" program works for simulating a keyboard and sending in untimed MIDI data. The "aseqview" program also works great for watching the notes being played, as they go by. So, my MIDI software stack appears to be in order. I don't have a hardware synthesizer hooked up at the moment (my Kawai K1 is showing its age, and a few keys are broken).

I also looked at "amidi", which features a -S option to send in untimed MIDI bytes, but unfortunately, that addresses an entirely different namespace. Evidently, it only speaks to "RawMIDI" devices, of which TiMidity is not.

So, I can't generate untimed MIDI data on my own. I was thinking of writing a small "midibeep" program that would do this, similar to what vkeybd does, but without requiring any user interaction.

Does such a program already exist?

I don't know of such thing, too. It'd be nice to have in alsa-utils.

Takashi

Josh Lehan wrote:

I also looked at "amidi", which features a -S option to send in untimed MIDI bytes, but unfortunately, that addresses an entirely different namespace. Evidently, it only speaks to "RawMIDI" devices, of which TiMidity is not.

Try the snd-virmidi driver. It is intended to make sequencer ports available as OSS midi devices, but you also get RawMIDI ports for free.

HTH Clemens