Linux MIDI Support vs Other OSes?

Official support for: bitwig.com
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Hey all,

Wondering if anyone has been able to get MIDI going nicely in Linux? I don't have a midi controller at home to test with and I use JACK-midi instead of ALSA-midi.

Does Bitwig just expect to talk to specific hardware midi devices? How does it work on other OSes? It doesn't seem to pick up jack-midi ports from my hardware or ALSA-midi ports from other software.

It'd be better if it used JACK for midi, since JACK is very modular. ALSA midi is cool too, if it just registered inputs and outputs for itself--and didn't rely on discovery anything as the only option.

Here's an example:
midi-ports.png
For those that don't know.. blue ports are audio, red ports are jack-midi and green ports are alsa-midi. The Non-Mixer devices are just a work around since Bitwig only discovers creates audio ports on itself in response to the ports that it discovers on the input/output devices you select in the preferences.
Hydrogen only supports MIDI via ALSA, but there's a daemon that does ALSA-JACK midi bridging that works perfectly , and the program I'm using for patching(Catia) shows that transparently, which is why Hydrogen has both JACK and ALSA midi ports. You can ALSA see that my interface has JACK midi ports.. and Bitwig has no midi ports of any kind. It also doesn't discover Hydrogen or Non-Sequencer so it seems like it's only willing to discover and talk to hardware MIDI devices?

I know audio/midi on Windows is basically not modular at all unless you use JACK or your host does everything for you.. and coreaudio on OSX seems to rely on making psuedo-devices...? How is MIDI working on other OSes? I don't have a USB-MIDI controller or interface handy to test with right now, I'll retrieve one from the studio tomorrow.. but they would use ALSA, has anyone had any luck with that? How does it work? Just discovery? I like to route MIDI between applications.. especially processing MIDI from hardware as it comes in.. it doesn't seem like this is possible currently.

Also, I don't see any option for transmitting MIDI clock? I do see a MIDI Clock Transmitter in the Controllers page, but I don't know what that is or how it works.


Sorry for the long, winding, and possibly repetitive post. I'm just trying to figure out how to integrate this into my setup.
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One more thing:

For the record I really like this application and look forward to see where it goes. I bought it today after playing with the demo for a few hours, because Bitwig is basically the only company who's really supporting us Linux users.

I'm more than willing to problem solve also. I'm not sure if some of the things I'm up to are mad science or not, but they're pretty common I think among computer musicians particularly Linux ones who are also programmers.

Damn, I wish I had gotten accepted to beta test this though.

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