On 2016-04-21 06:38, Jonathan Wilkes via Pd-list wrote:
Why can't alsa midi report "connectable" devices inside Pd, to be displayed in a dropdown?
because nobody has implemeted it.
personally i find that it preferable to use a specialised software for the patching¹. Pd doesn't necessarily need to poll the available MIDI devices every know and then to discover newly connected devices. otoh, applications like qjackctl can (and will) do this for you, and you can easily configure it to automatically connect your AKM320 and your UM-1 to Pd whenever you plug them in, while reserving your BCM2000 for the use with ardour.
i also find it preferable to be able to route multiple MIDI devices to the same MIDI port within Pd e.g. if I use ch#1 on my MIDI keyboard and ch#10 on my drum-sequencer, and i want to hook both into Pd, there is little use to open up two MIDI ports and reserve ch1-16 for the keyboard and ch17-32 for the drum sequencer; instead i want MIDI merge functionality. otoh, if i want to drive Pd with two independent multi-channel MIDI sequencers, it might very well make sense to be able to separate them on a patch level.
the alsa-midi implementation *used* to auto-connect to all available MIDI-ports (in special circumstances). this was disabled because:
- it was unclear how to turn off this behaviour (e.g. for those who
wanted their MIDI-devices to be connected to multiple ports in Pd)
- it would also automatically connect with the MIDI-thru virtual device
that get's automatically loaded, and *this* is rather annoying. at that time there was noobvious way to programmatically exclude the MIDI-thru device (or e.g. any non-hardware devices), short of hardcoding their name into a blacklist, which is not seem particularily appealing.
anyhow. the main challenge is to make the system flexible for power-users and at the same time allow plug-and-play setup when the flexibility is not needed. the current implementation favours flexibility. if someone can come-up with a scheme that allows both, we should of course go that route. if somebody comes up with a solution that favours plug-and-play at the expense of flexibility, i'd like to veto.
cfg,dasdr IOhannes
¹ fwiiw, there are even some people who very much prefer JACK audio applications to *not* automatically connect to the "system" output - or any other output for that matter (unfortunately this is an option that Pd currently does not offer)