Noob wanting to set up (not so simple) MIDI in gentoo

[Gav]

I'm thinking about putting my old (but still great) SW60XG ISA MIDI output card in my gentoo box. (It would relieve me from running a windows box to do this task). The SW60XG is a Yamaha card I've had since early '97 that I haven't found to be bettered in sounds for the money. With new PC's not having ISA slot's I need to pop it in an ISA board - my gentoo box being a prime candidate, so I don't have to keep my KT133 Athlon running forever.

Currently I have a Creative SB-512-PCI POS in there as well - but I haven't had time to get it working yet. What I want to achieve is to allow any incoming MIDI information on the SB-512 MIDI port to be sent to the XG with minimal latency. This doesn't sound too hard to achieve, but I don't know where to start! So if you can help me with commands & packages to allow MIDI to work I'd be very happy!

(Also if I can get audio out from the SB-512 it could be good - I envisage having a continuous MP3 stream to feed to my hi-fi).

[lx]

Probably your best bet is ALSA (checkout gentoo site documentation -> alsa) and hope both boards are supported. I plugged in my midi keyboard just for fun and I could simply cat /dev/sound/??midi to /dev/sound/??midi don't know exactly what name it was I think /dev/sound/[a/ad]mide > /dev/sound/midi . So setup both cards correctly (if they are supported) and just cat the correct ports, latency shouldn't be at a minimum, well use the preempt and latency patch for the kernel to be on the safe side. ps. I have the sblive gameport compiled in my kernel, don't know if that mathers,.....

Well hope you fix it,

Cya lX.
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"Remember there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.", Frank Zappa

[Gav]

I should be able to try that over the weekend - thanks.

Where would I find the low latency/pre-emptive patch?

[french tony]

aconnect, part of alsa is what you want.
i have used it but i cant quite recollect the details...