[Ardour-Dev] ardour as audio backend

[Evan Laforge]

> 1: Are you aware that Ardour3 supports MIDI tracks? Ie, you can click in
> notes, edit the durations, set the channels etc etc

Yes, I'm aware.  But... I wanna do it my way!  If I was happy with
existing sequencers approaches to sequencing I'd save myself the
bother of writing my own :)

> 2: There's a lot of MIDI sequencers out there that will playback MIDI, and
> have no synths at all: Seq24 for instance. As you said, "come up with some
> solution of your own". If you output JACK MIDI, I'm happy.

Yes, JACK MIDI is a possibility, but as I mentioned I don't even have
a scheduler, I use the OS's scheduler.  My understanding is that jack,
being a synchronous protocol, doesn't support scheduling and therefore
I would have to write a low latency scheduler myself.  Being lazy, I'd
rather not do that if the OS already provides one.  Of course if it
turns out alsa doesn't provide a scheduler then I'm stuck anyway, but
I thought I noticed that it does...

> 3: I (as a user now) would prefer to have a nice standalone MIDI seq, than
> one that 1/2 leans on Ardour as I don't use Ardour in the sequencing stage
> of my projects.

It works just fine standalone, but if I want to do the three things I
was talking about, then of course I need to cooperate with a DAW.

> Have you released the sources? I'd be intrested in building it...? I'm on
> linux though, I gather your on a Mac. Has testing been done on a linux box?

I estimate another 6 months to 1 year before it's in a generally
useful state, and I'll certainly release source then.  No testing on
linux so far, but the GUI kit is cross platform (originally X11
oriented but also runs on OS X and even windows), and I plan on making
sure it works on linux before a release.  I probably just have to
write an alsa midi backend.