Hello Chris,
> > It's obviously targeting the first available ALSA soft
> synth, and it ignores
> > the range of hardware MIDI ports.
>
> Yes, this was intentional. The aim was to avoid as
> far as possible
> situations in which the device appears to be connected but
> does not
> actually play, given that the most likely scenario when
> picking "the
> first hardware device" is that we end up playing to either
> a
> record-only device such as a keyboard, or to an unused
> soundcard port.
> You two both have valid MIDI playback hardware, but by far
> the most
> likely thing to be on the first MIDI port for any random
> user is a USB
> MIDI input device.
Understood.
> This was prompted partly by my experience at the Linux
> audio
> conference in 2008, in which I had to get up during a
> presentation on
> plucked-string synthesis by Julius O Smith to help out the
> speaker
> because his Rosegarden instance was playing to his
> input-only MIDI
> keyboard instead of the soft synth he was trying to
> demo. Simply
> preferring the software to hardware on startup wouldn't
> have helped,
> because he started Rosegarden before the synth, but having
> the
> instrument come up labelled as unconnected would at least
> have made
> for a more obvious prompt as to what was wrong.
I remember hearing this story before. Having an item come up unconnected would
be fine if there were several items on the list which in RG Classic, this was
most certainly the case. We are no longer so zealous to connect every port to
every device or create new devices so that we can connect to a port.
That was a big issue in Classic. The Device manager was viral. RG tried to
make a device for just about every port it saw.
This way is much better. But to make an effort to get a sound out the box on
start up, we have to connect to at least one playback device...which I believe
we all agree. It sounds like we agree on the pecking order.
>
> Failing to connect any input device was not intentional, I
> just forgot
> about it, though again I'm not quite sure how you'd do it
> reliably.
> This time around I was far more concerned to avoid doing
> the wrong
> thing (i.e. connecting to something that should not be
> connected to)
> than to avoid leaving things unconnected, because doing the
> wrong
> thing rather than nothing was the behaviour that users had
> found so
> exasperating with the previous releases.
Understood. See above.
I wanted to make certain that we connected to at least on record device and on
playback device.
Of course if we find exact matches for one or more of said devices, then there
is no need to make any additional guesses.
But, in a case on no playback or no record, a best guess is a pretty prudent
thing to do.
With the visual separation of devices and ports that we have in the device
manager, it is easy to see all devices, all ports and all the devices that have
connections. So if a user has 20 playback ports showing and only one playback
device, then the user can decide if they need more devices, and they know
exactly which device is the one RG is using for the tracks.
It's a good deal.
If a user open an RG file that has ten devices on it and only has a couple
ports, RG will connect one of them up and let the user decide what to do about
the other devices..since they are not connected and RG didn't attempt to
connect them.
This is good all around I believe. It is a good balance between RG being
helpful and RG getting in the way of making music.
> Incidentally, autoconnection is only supposed to happen at
> all (now)
> if none of the connections found in the document itself
> were able to
> be restored. If at least one instrument has a
> connection string that
> matches something you actually have, then RG should connect
> everything
> it can by name and leave the rest alone.
As said before as long as we do this for record and play back devices
separately. Ensure at least one connection for each.
Exact matches get connected first.
If we still have no record on playback devices connected then make a guess.
Sincerely,
Julie S.
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