Re: Midi hardware

[Tim Janik <timj gtk org>]

On Wed, 25 Apr 2007, Jeremie Lasalle Ratelle wrote:

> Alright, I searched but didn't find anything...
>
> Could you wise men point me to the best choice for
> an all in one usb midi mic guitar controller which
> is beast compatible?

not sure what a midi-mic-guitar controller would do,
guitars and mics cannot be connected to MIDI afaik.
in any case, you don't need MIDI hardware to be sepcifically
taylored to beast, beast can use all MIDI devices that
have ALSA (or OSS) kernerl driver support.
you can find a list of supported ALSA devices, including
MIDI devices here:
  http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/

many, but not all USB midi devices work with ALSA. i recently
got an PCR-M1 keyboard and a generic usb<->midi converter:
  http://www.roland.com/products/en/PCR-M1/index.html
  http://www.roland.com/products/en/UM-3EX/index.html
both work well with ALSA.

the PCR is just a bit cumbersome to use with beast at the moment
because it sends events only on the second subchannel, which means
i have to start beast like this:
  $ beast -m alsa=hw:1,0,1

FYI, here's the relevant MIDI device listing from beast, which
you should get once you have successfully setup a MIDI device
through ALSA:
  $ beast --bse-driver-list
  Available MIDI drivers:
    alsa alsa=PLUGIN:CARD,DEV,SUBDEV
      Advanced Linux Sound Architecture MIDI driver, using
      ALSA 1.0.11.
      The device specification follows the ALSA device naming
      conventions, a detailed description of which is available
      at the project's website:
          http://alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/midi.html
      Various ALSA plugins can be used here, 'hw' allows direct
      adressing of hardware channels by card, device and subdevice.
        PLUGIN - the ALSA plugin, 'default' is usually good enough
        CARD   - the card number for plugins like 'hw'
        DEV    - the device number for plugins like 'hw'
        SUBDEV - the subdevice number for plugins like 'hw'
      Devices (PCR - EDIROL PCR at usb-0000:00:1d.0-1, full speed):
     >        hw:1,0 (subdevices: 3*input + 2*output)
      Devices (UM3EX - EDIROL UM-3EX at usb-0000:00:1d.1-2, full speed):
     >        hw:2,0 (subdevices: 4*input + 4*output)

we'll probably add a MIDI device selector to beast at some point,
so subdevice selection can then be handled through the GUI.

> Thank you very much.

---
ciaoTJ