Not here... It takes about 3 seconds to fully launch. I have a gaming laptop so it's a bit hefty
Anyway, that’s strange that the Enabled menu is there with no devices present. What shows up in the MIDI Output menu?
I'm going to try on a different laptop right now just for the heck of it (same Ubuntu version)
I posted another experiment you could try in the issue on GitHub.
unless you're pulling those in from somewhere else
(And then I add back the selected output if it was missing, so the trigger will continue to work when you run BLT with that device connected.)
The
midi-clj readme even says “In Ubuntu Linux I use the snd-virmidi kernel module to provide software midi ports. USB midi devices should be pretty much plug and play.” so this ought to work!
Computers and software have grown so complex that it is amazing when anything works.
If Raspbian and a USB MIDI keyboard is close enough I could try some stuff there, but this is very frustrating.
Okay yeah that should be enough to test it with
Bro, I just wanna say that I am wholly grateful for all your help. I really appreciate you taking the time to help dig into all of this
I will try some experiments with Raspbian and get back to you. I probably don’t have time tonight because I need to finish laundry and then tackle today’s Advent of Code challenge. But hopefully tomorrow.
Thanks, you too! Maybe sleeping on this will give me some other ideas too. I suspect it has to do with the way that BLT opens MIDI devices as soon as it knows about them, and keeps them open, to be able to share them between triggers. I will have to re-learn how that all works, and then see if there is a way to not do that in Linux if it doesn’t work there. But the first step will be seeing if I can reproduce the problem with hardware I have here.
You’ll be the first to know when I do, @whoman321! Unfortunately, last week was too busy, between work and the competetiveness my coworkers encourage in solving Advent of Code problems. I hope to have time to take out and set up the Pi this weekend, though, probably Sunday afternoon.
Well, @whoman321, I finally had time to hook everything up, and I can confirm that Raspbian has the same probelmatic behavior as you have reported. I will try to dig a little bit deeper, but right now I am being stymied as I can’t seem to establish an nREPL connection from my development machine to the Beat Link Trigger process running on the Pi, which will make experimentation far more tedious. I’ll start installing some development tools on the Pi.
But what seems to be the case is that MIDI interface management works fundamentally different in Linux JVMs that macOS and Windows JVMs. So if you can help try to find a way around this, that will definitely speed things up. However, we would have to be very careful not to change the way it currently works on macOS and Windows, because I have many people using it for touring shows, festivals, and clubs today, and can’t risk breaking them. So for now the answer is going to be telling people not to try to use the built-in trigger MIDI features on Linux, and perhaps deprecating that OS family entirely.