How to connect automatically to controllers

Questions
1

Hello,

The time I need to connect my controllers to supercollider is always a struggle for me. Once they are setup, everything works fine.

I am wondering how do you manage them ?

I’m trying to write code to automate it but it’s not working like I expect:

When I connect my controller and try MIDIdef, it does not work. Jack doesn’t even show the MIDI in/out of supercollider

I figured I need to call MIDIClient.init for SC to add a jack in/out

But now I need to connect manually the controller to sc in jack
So I figured I can use

port = MIDIIn.findPort ("SE25", "SE25 MIDI 1");

to find the port then connect it to SC

MIDIIn.connect(0, port.uid)

The problem is if I connect my controller after calling MIDIClient.init, MIDIIn.findPort doesn’t find it. MIDIClient.destinations doesn’t includes it.

I tried both
MIDIClient.restart;
MIDIClient.disposeClient;

But it does nothing

If I call MIDIClient.init a second time. The device now appears. But there is also a random number of additional output and inputs of SC inserted into the list (and jack). If I don’t take care, the s.meter become very big quick!

Thanks!

2

  1. Connect your controller first.

  2. MIDIClient.init

  3. MIDIIn.connect something (or just MIDIIn.connectAll).

  4. MIDIdef should then work transparently.

It is a weakness of SC’s MIDI client that it doesn’t recognize devices connected after initialization. Other audio software might but ours doesn’t. The solution is to connect the hardware first.

hjh

3

For everyone interested, I once sketched a feature to get connect/disconnect events from ALSA midi. You can see it here:

I eventually abandoned that, I could pick it up again if there’s interest!

4

While rewriting my MIDI/jack code, I found that this method MIDIClient.list actually refresh the list of MIDIEndPoint and then findPort works without restarting SC or running MIDIClient.init a second time !

Since you say it is impossible, I’m a bit puzzled. If this is actually a feature and not a bug, I suggest to rename it to MIDIClient.refresh to be more clear

5

Maybe you can use https://github.com/SCLOrkHub/SCLOrkTools/blob/master/classes/SCLOrkJack.sc

You can specify port numbers

MIDIClient.init(6, 9);

On Linux there are also other tools to manage JACK connections, like Non/New-Session-Manager (client jackpatch), aj-snapshot or via a bash script using jack_connect for instance all though I’m not 100% sure atm if and how MIDI connections are handled by them).

6

Oh, OK, I didn’t realize it would do that.

So it’s easier, then!

In a related scenario: In my last show, I wanted to play notes in VCV Rack using MIDI from SC. That was a bit of a chicken-egg scenario: If I initialized SC’s MIDIClient before launching Rack, then SC couldn’t find Rack’s MIDI port. If I launched Rack first, then it wouldn’t find SC’s MIDI port (and this would require manual intervention, which I didn’t want).

The solution turned out to be a2j-midid – create a virtual thru port first, and connect both SC and Rack to that.

hjh