Using a midi keyboard with FreeBSD (jack update, ardour3 alpha...)

[Juergen Lock]

Small update:

On Thu, Sep 01, 2011 at 01:01:31AM +0200, Juergen Lock wrote:
> Hi!
> 
>  So I was looking for midi software that could work with a midi
> keyboard on an usb midi interface (snd_uaudio, /dev/umidi0.0), and
> found that at least both rosegarden and musescore only know alsa seq
> interfaces (which we don't have nor emulate on FreeBSD), not raw
> midi (I'm not sure there's a difference between alsa raw midi and
> oss raw midi)  I then found audio/lmms which appears to support
> oss midi, but couldn't get it to work with my interface (and also
> found it cannot export midi, only save in its own private fileformat.)
> I even tried to update lmms to the latest release (I'd need to clean
> that up before it would be ready for public consumption), but then...
> 
>  I found that the 3.0 alpha versions of Ardour...
> 
> 	http://ardour.org/node/4532
> 	http://ardour.org/a3_features
> 	http://ardour.org/a3_features_midi
> 	http://ardour.org/a3_features_midi_editing
> 	http://www.archive.org/details/Introduction_to_Ardour_3.0_MIDI
> 
> ...have grown midi support, _and_ ardour uses jack for both midi
> output and input so I could use my keyboard with audio/jack_umidi.
> Well, so now I have a first preliminary port of 3.0alpha10 svn
> r10000:  (same revision as the Linux binaries on their site)
> 
> 	http://people.freebsd.org/~nox/tmp/ardour-3.0alpha10-preliminary.patch
> 
> (apply on top of the current audio/ardour in the portstree)
> 
>  This needs a newer version of audio/jack so I updated that too:
> (please test this update even if you don't use ardour or midi)
> 
> 	http://people.freebsd.org/~nox/tmp/jack-0.120.1.patch
> 
>  TODO:
> 
> - Test (and possibly fix) the VST stuff (it uses wine and thus probably
>   only works on i386 and I'm on amd64 so I didn't attempt to build it.)
> - Fix the port so it respects C{,XX}FLAGS?  (it now uses waf which
>   seems to ignore them.)
> - Add slv2 support and test it (would at least need updating audio/slv2
>   because ardour3 needs slv2 >= 0.6.4 .)

audio/slv2 was updated yesterday so I added the dependencies and
verified the port still passes tb:

	http://people.freebsd.org/~nox/tmp/ardour-3.0alpha10-preliminary2.patch

I don't have any lv2 plugins tho so I can't test this...

> - More missing features?
> - Add knob to build release version and/or strip the installed
>   objects? (/usr/local/lib/ardour3 is currently 1.6G, the build
>   dir work/ is 3.7G.  It appears tho you can run the build from
>   below the work/ dir without installing it by invoking:
> 
> 	work/ardour-3.0alpha10_10000/gtk2_ardour/ardev
> 
>   )
> - Test!  (are the Ardour devs interested in FreeBSD bugreports?
>   I don't know. :)  What I do know is they don't want the alphas
>   discussed in their webforums, qoute:
> 
> -------snip-----------
> This is an alpha version of Ardour 3.0.
> 
> You are respectfully requested NOT to ask for assistance with build issues
> and not to report issues with Ardour 3.0 on the forums at ardour.org.
> 
> Please use IRC, the bug tracker and/or the ardour mailing lists (-dev or -user)
> 
> Thanks for your co-operation with our development process.
> -------snip-----------
> 
>  Enjoy, :)
> 	Juergen
> 
> PS:  The export function in the gui doesn't work for midi tracks, but
> you can fork a track and after that grab a midi file out of:
> 
> 	<session dir>/interchange/<name>/midifiles