Re: KMid (was Re: [fluid-dev] Re: lost connection to Jack server)

[jimmy]

--- On Wed, 10/21/09, Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas <address@hidden> wrote:

> > I used to use Kmid, but no one ported it to Qt4/Kde4
> yet, not sure how long
> > before it would be called an orphan.
> 
> I'm already starting the adoption process.


Pedro,

Alright, good to know.  You got SVN/CVS, discussion group for it somewhere?

Would it be better depending on just QT4, or QT4.5, instead of KDE.  I prefer 
lighter-weight apps that works well with simple interface, nothing fancy.

I just read a couple of articles on Slashdot about Pulse Audio.  The project 
lead, and some of their developers want it on every desktop and claimed that 
"latency is good" (???, address@hidden(!^#!!!), that 20-second audio buffer 
would help them make less interrupt calls to save power or so.  Yeah, right...  
Saving energy on a few lousy hardware interrupts and blast away on the 
speakers, or their "continuous reconfiguration daemon".  Their idea of "playing 
music" is to use their couch-potato ears.  No wonder the rap craps are 
everywhere and they think they are great musicians, too.


> KMid is about 10 years old. It is time for a revamp. My
> plans for it are:
> * Remove the deprecated OSS /dev/sequencer interface
> support. It has been 
> dropped from OSSv4, anyway. 
> * A fair ALSA sequencer implementation: don't
> create/destroy the client and 
> port instances on each play/pause/stop action. This would
> allow the usage of 
> KMid with a MIDI patchbay application like qjackctl.

So you spent sometime with the adopted kid (uh... code) already :-)



> * MIDI Output implemented on pluggable backends. First one
> will be the ALSA 
> sequencer backend, but I would like to develop win32 and
> Mac native backends 
> some day. 

Jack-midi could probably help on win32 and even Mac, I think???



> Also, a multiplatform backend based on
> libfluidsynth would be 
> interesting for casual users, needing only to configure a
> SF2 file and the 
> audio output. Some new features would be needed in
> libfluidsynth to create 
> this backen> 
> Regards,
> Pedro
d, for instance: parse and process the lyric and
> text SMF events.

That is if libfluidsynth care to spend time with lyrics and midi-text events at 
all.  Although, I think fluidsynth code is not pretty to add new functions to 
it.  Haven't looked at Gleamsynth (a sort-of Fluidsynth in C++) since the 
Spring, but I think it did have some performance issues back then.

I think the new kmid (or whatever its new name maybe) could do what it always 
does...  send midi events to alsa-seq, or jack-midi, and also parse and display 
lyrics/midi-text.

It may be interesting if it (or its library) also has a separate output port 
(output-only ???) for lyrics/midi-text events separately from the normal midi 
port.  This way, people can make their own UI, or even network-UI if they want.

Jimmy