MIDI drivers mad confusing!!!

[Гага́рин]

hi,

Many apps got option for different midi drivers:

raw
alsa_seq
jack

In which situation is best to use which one? It's confusing because sometimes they create ports in 'Audio' tab, other times in 'MIDI' tab or 'ALSA' tab. Sometimes in all of them.

Performance wise and rule of thumb which driver should be use priorily? Perhaps the question is which MIDI driver is best suited for what?

thanks

[autostatic]

alsa-midi allows custom non-standard messages (sysex etc) at cost of jitter, while jack-midi is more limited but has no jitter or latency whatsoever.

Afaik JACK MIDI still has jitter, especially with external gear. The only option that doesn't have jitter that I've heard of is the alsarawmidi driver in introduced in Jack2 1.9.8. Haven't tried it as I'm not a Jack2 user

[j_e_f_f_g]

ignore the raw option, it's old and basically unused now.

Oh god no. That's the most low-level, stream-lined MIDI API. For all practical purposes, the alsa seq API goes through this. Always use the raw api if a program offers that option, especially if the program syncs MIDI to other, non-MIDI data (such as digital audio).

[varpa]

FYI - firewire devices via ffado use Jack midi.