LinuxMusicians

Hi there,

I've just installed ubuntu studio 18.10 so possibly a bit of a beginner question sorry

I'm trying to work out midi with Bitwig. I would like to send midi from pure data to Bitwig.

from a bit of googling it seems Bitwig doesn't support jack midi . .

so i select alsa midi in pure data but i cant seem to work out the settings on the other side to make the midi come through to bitwig

are there settings outside of bitwig i need to tweak like in qjackctl or patchage or ubuntu studio controls or something?

any help very much appreciated

This might work: https://github.com/falkTX/JackAss. Have not used it myself, however

I do not know about Pure Data. What I can say though is that as Xubuntu 18.04 (and previously several Linux Mint versions) boots, and as jackd is automatically launched by pulse audio, MIDI is in a state that can be immediately used by Bitwig 2.4.3 configured to use jackd for audio.

For me, for the past few years, it's rather the contrary that happens. To be able to use MIDI with Mixbus32C which is derived from Ardour who shares the same maker, Paul Davis, as jackd, I have to do the following prior to launch Mixbus32C:

a2j_control ehw start

Then I can launch Mixbus32C and use MIDI.

To come back to Bitwig and use MIDI again in Bitwig I have to do the following before launching Bitwig:

killall /usr/bin/a2jmidid

Fortunately I made aliases for both. I could also bundle these two in the launching of each DAW so they'll be transparent.

Anyways, just to say that MIDI works well from that point of view. It might give you an idea about the problem you see.

Cheers.

Bitwig insists on only using hardware ALSA MIDI ports. It also takes full control of those, so no other program can use it while Bitwig is using it.
To work around this, you could create a virtual ALSA MIDI device and let Bitwig use this device. This wil allow you to:
1. Connect hardware ALSA MIDI ports to the virtual MIDI device so Bitwig can use it, while simultaneously allowing other programs to use these devices as well,
2. Run a JACK-ALSA MIDI bridge and connect the bridged JACK MIDI ports to the virtual ALSA MIDI device, allowing input from JACK MIDI into Bitwig.

This article shows how it can be done: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/MIDI-HOWTO-10.html

Basically, to test this quickly:
1. Get ALSA sound cards and their indices: less /proc/asound/cards
2. Run the following where the number is a new index not currently used: sudo modprobe snd-virmidi snd_index=2
3. Output of (1) will now show a new virtual MIDI device, as will the ALSA tab in QJackCtl.
4. Set Bitwig to use this virtual device.
5. Run a JACK-ALSA MIDI bridge such as a2jmidid. This will bridge all your JACK MIDI ports to ALSA. I.e. all MIDI ports from your MIDI tab in QJackCtl will be available in the ALSA tab.
6. Connect the required bridged ports to the first slot of the virtual MIDI device and test.

The article explains how to make the virtual MIDI device permament by adding it to the ALSA section in /etc/modules.conf.
Hope this works.

thanks very much for the replies, glad to see it wasn't just me missing something obvious! will try these suggestions when i have a free moment next thanks !!