Alsa Midi Driver Question/Issue

liebrecht at grossmann-venter.com liebrecht at grossmann-venter.com
Wed May 27 04:49:26 CEST 2020


This is not really a straight forward user question and thereby I post 
it in the developer forum.

My Problem:
I use Alsa/Jack/Pulseaudio to run quite an extensive audio interface to 
DAW with involved Jack routings of both Audio and Midi.
The system runs like greased lightning and I can do things on Linux that 
I could never do on windows period.

The problem is that there exist applicatio9ns that is not ALSA/JACK Midi 
friendly.
One such Application is Bitwig for Linux

1) Bitwig absolutely requires to have exclusive access to a USB pad 
Controller in order to recognise the controller.
2) We all know that the Alsa Midi driver forwards ALL Midi devices it 
finds to Jack where the  aj2midid daemon provides a bridge to jack and 
the midi devices are then elegantly routed with jack to jack enabled 
programs. The alsa midi and jack bridge is a thing of beauty.
3) However Bitwig to be able to use a midi pad controller DEMANDS that 
you DISABLE alsa midi driver before it recognizes the midi controller.
4) This is very unfortunate and very W$ndish approach to devices.
5) So at the moment I can either use Bitwig with a pad controller and 
absolutely no other midi through Alsa/Jack will work, or my alsa/jack 
routings work but I cannot use Bitwig with a Midi Controller.

My Question
1) Is it in any way possible to configure the Alsa Midi driver tgo 
ignore a specific Midi device in order that my Alsa/Jack routings can be 
used in conjunction with Bitwig using its pad-controller.
2) To summarize my question, I need to somehow blacklist the midi 
controller to not be touched or accessed ihn any way. Basically totally 
forget about its existence.
3) I am sure this must be possible as there are a lot of W$ndish style 
programs like this developed to need exclusive access to a midi device.
4) I tried to convince the developers of Bitwig to make Bitwig Jack 
aware, but it is seemingly not going to happen. That would have been the 
right way.

I sincerely hope you will have a recommendation I can work on and 
impliment.

Thank you.


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