Hi!
I own midi keyboard LauchKey49, initially I used to switching between ALSA and JACK when I want playing, it's not always worked well, so I had to restart computer , then I tried to chain ALSA and JACK in order to play music and to hear music, it wasn't stable too. I don't know why, but the conclusion is whether you are playing with JACK or hearing with ALSA I failed to combine them together.
Recently I started mentioning that I tend not to play knowing that now I need to set all the stuff up, configure JACK and etc, therefore I am thinking to buy raspberry pi exclusively for this need, just in order to have a host ready to play immediately.
Do you have experience in running midi on platforms like raspberry or similar, if it's going to work or not due to some reason.
In general how you deal with the problem when you don't have a separate host for midi keyboard and need to have a lot of headache switching between ALSA JACK when you just want to play for a free 10 min you have.
I appreciate you help.
Separate host for Midi keyboard
Moderators: MattKingUSA, khz
Re: Separate host for Midi keyboard
Alsa is the driver for the soundcard. Jack is a layer on top of that. You can use both at the same time, from a technical standpoint, as long as nothing locks the device. Not much of an issue with current versions of stuff. You can even have the pulseaudio layer over jack over alsa. And various complexities. It doesn't set itself up automatically in a lot of cases. And jack doesn't seem to play well with cpu frequency scaling. But it should mostly work. As long as your distro packaged your system with those options enabled.
I tend to setup a few bootable usb linux installs and use those when I do midi stuff. Using them keeps those configurations pre-setup and any CLI stuff in the .bash_history. But I'm by no means a typical user. I suppose a raspberry pi is an option, but you should already have all the hardware you need for the task. And there's quite a few other options out now with specs noticeably better than RPI. You might get a little more mileage out of a usb audio device that you can leave configured for midi while keeping the other soundcard(s) untouched.
I tend to setup a few bootable usb linux installs and use those when I do midi stuff. Using them keeps those configurations pre-setup and any CLI stuff in the .bash_history. But I'm by no means a typical user. I suppose a raspberry pi is an option, but you should already have all the hardware you need for the task. And there's quite a few other options out now with specs noticeably better than RPI. You might get a little more mileage out of a usb audio device that you can leave configured for midi while keeping the other soundcard(s) untouched.