From: Chris C. <ca...@al...> - 2009-03-25 21:36:24
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On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 8:56 PM, D. Michael McIntyre <ros...@gm...> wrote: > I remember > somebody having a total conniption fit over the horrible idea of having to > expose "ports" to anyone. It was either you or Rich Me. Loose talk about ports in the context of a system like ALSA always confused the hell out of me, because a port is a quite different concept (in terms of how to describe it, what to connect to it, and what effect that has) depending on what you're talking about (hardware adapter? cable? software synth?). Our terminology may not have proven terribly successful, but at least it got Richard away from referring to every completely unrelated thing that had anything to do with MIDI as a "port", so I could understand what the hell he was talking about. In hindsight I should have investigated more carefully the causes of this confusion, because it might have been useful to recognise the functional differences between these different kinds of ports (or connections). For example, software synth ports could usefully have been handled differently from hardware ports in our connection logic (they are qualitatively different in that they have an identity -- a synth's input port represents that synth, while a hardware port could have nothing or any number of things connected to it). Chris |