Online music composition (was Re: [softwerk-dev] Troubles with Softwerk)

[Josh G. <jg...@us...>]

Jaroslav Kysela wrote:

> On Sun, 26 Nov 2000, Paul Barton-Davis wrote:
>
> > >I'm not sure, if you know about the virtual midi devices which can be used
> > >like the ordinary rawmidi devices, but the midi stream is parsed to the
> > >sequencer events and versa vice. The virtual midi device behaves like a
> > >sequencer port, so you may connect it to other ports (like the wavetable
> > >sythesizers or midi uart drivers). So far, no changes are needed on your
> > >side. You must only use the ALSA rawmidi devices instead of OSS ones.
> >
> > Ah, I had a feeling that something like this existed. Very nice. Josh,
> > this is what you should use to use ALSA with your AWE. Set up a
> > virmidi device (ask on alsa-devel how to do this if you don't know),
> > then use aconnect to connect it to the AWE input sequencer port. then
> > use the relevant /dev/snd/midi... specification in the SoftWerk rc file.
>
> The EMU8000 and EMU10K1 synth devices creates virtual rawmidi devices
> (second and third rawmidi device) by default.
>

Awesome.. I'm always amazed at the flexibility of ALSA.
Anyone interested in starting an online music composition system?? The thought
occured to me recently that ALSA is very close to supporting such a system.
Imagine multiple musicians creating a "channel" on a server to connect arbitrary
sequencer clients to. Sample patches (sound fonts etc.) could be uploaded through
a web interface and cataloged in a database on the server. Each "channel" would
have a list of loaded patches. The MIDI stream would then be available for others
to connect to for listening (they would also need the correct sample patches). Or
streamed via MP3, Ogg Vorbis, etc. on the server with software based wavetable
emulators or re-sampled with a hardware wavetable card.
I'm sure latency issues would make this even more amusing when trying to jam with
multiple people :)
Anyone working on something like this?? Anyone want to?
    Josh Green