Ardour needs both MIDI and ALSA support

Ardour now has MIDI support, but doesn’t support devices run by snd-usb-midi.

I just want to say that I would gladly pay for Ardour if this changes, because as it is, Ardour’s MIDI functionality is completely useless to me. It would be a perfect DAW for me if this could be fixed.

To illustrate this point is this screenshot: http://audiodef.com/ardour_alsa.png

What’s green cannot connect to red and vice versa (and a2j bridge is running in this shot).

Keep up the great work, and I hope to see this fixed in future versions. I’m only trying to provide constructive comments because I really love Ardour. A lot. But the MIDI implementation, as I said, has zero purpose in my studio without ALSA device support.

I forgot to mention one thing: Rosegarden has no trouble with this and has always been reliable in this way. Until this is supported in Ardour, I have no choice but to use Rosegarden + Ardour as a complete MIDI+audio solution (not a big fan of Rosegarden’s audio). If Rosegarden can do it, Ardour should be able to!

The next version of Ardour (accessible via the nightlies, though we’re not quite there yet) has a completely redesigned audio+MIDI I/O system, which includes direct audio + MIDI I/O via ALSA (among other things). JACK remains an option, naturally.

However, you’re wrong about it being impossible in the version you have. a2jmidid will create JACK ports for ALL ALSA MIDI ports (but not the opposite). I do this all the time. And of course in JACK 1 (most recent versions), a2jmidid is built into JACK as a slave driver to reduce jitter and latency and overhead. I don’t know why you have issues with this - the only thing I can think of is that you do not use the -e flag of a2jmidid, which is needed to make it map “external” (aka hardware) MIDI ports.

Looking forward to the next version! :slight_smile: