[PD] Interapplication MIDI communication in Linux?

[n++k]

[Michal Seta <mis at music.mcgill.ca>]
|
| dear linux-pd gurus
| 
| Does anyone have experience in sending MIDI from one application to
| another under linux?  Specifically, I would like fiddle with keykit and
| send
| MIDI data to pd.  Keykit has support for alsa (but since I don't have a
| MIDI
| interface for my PC I can't even test if the MIDI is getting anywhere
| but I get
| no error messages so I assume all is fine...  stupid, huh?...).

- alsa has a special card called 'virmidi' which as its name says, is a 
virtual midi device designed for such purposes. so basically you can
feed it midi in and out through the /dev/midi? devices which are
associated
with it. 

after you have loaded the module, you'll have to connect two ports
of this virtual card that will communicate between PD and KeyKit, 
for this you have to use 'aconnect'. 

- if you have oss, there's a midi loopback device (i've never used)

- else if you want to hack something fast you can use a named pipe 
('mkfifo mymidi') and give the path of this fifo to your applications
as needed. But the performance is poorer than the solutions i mentionned
above..

--
  n
++k