# alsa midi is the key to serious musicproduction



## flyweight (Mar 21, 2011)

I think that the alsa midi layer is a great contribution to FreeBSD and audio/midi music production. Why? Because its the portal to get midi to wine apps. There is even an asio to wine project to get the sound out in low latency with jack.

So all the ingredients are there.

-usb midi
-wine and audio apps. Reaper, Adobe Audition, Reasson etc. softsynths I am running Alchemy and Absynth in an vsthost and wine. But I can only input notes with the keyboard.
-Semi/Pro audio cards supported by 4front
-Wine asio support http://sourceforge.net/projects/wineasio/

The only missing link is midi to wine. Anyone knows what need to be done? I am now very close to the point of wiping out my windos partion. mmmmm


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## SirDice (Mar 22, 2011)

Midi support is almost non-existent on FreeBSD unfortunately.


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## flyweight (Mar 22, 2011)

That's not true, because you can use usb controllers and keyboards with the uaudio.ko module. I even put i the first notes 

So the kernel functionality is there, the software also, except the RAW midi to alsa.


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## flyweight (Mar 22, 2011)

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=17393

I followed this guide. The only requirement is that your usb device is usb midi compliant. There was alsa sombody offering (paradox) to make the alsa midi libs work. I sent him an message but it seems it to long ago.. MM I wish I could code hardcore c


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## mathiasp (Dec 17, 2011)

*Maybe Jack Midi is the way to go on FreeBSD*

I think Alsa just will not happen on fbsd FreeBSD. But I have Almost all pieces together using jack, jack_keyboard, jack_umidi, ardour3, and fluidsynth, stitched together with QJackCtl. Will start to test with an akai lpd8 as actual hardware midi controller after 12/24  

Just need to get fluidsynth to produce sound via jack, which strangely doesn't work, even though it shows up in qjackctl and is routed correctly.

I really don't know how hard it is to get programs like rosegarden who support both jack and alsa to make alsa optional, but this seems to me the more logical way then to look for alsa on fbsd FreeBSD. I see more and more programmers on linux using jack midi, maybe this could be accelerated with fbsd FreeBSD.

Users asking for it.
Cheers, Mathias


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## tingo (Dec 17, 2011)

The main problem with anything midi and jack (in fact anything more complex than using simple audio in or audio out) under FreeBSD, is that I haven't found out how to configure things. A complete writeup (for a non-musician) about how to configure a system which use jack would be nice.


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