SynthBoost Project #4 - Flow Through Experiment

As I try and look through what I will be doing, it might be nice to get a general flow through experiment up and going. What I envision is to have all of the vintage gear hooked into the 4x4 midi interface, then through the powered usb hub, through the RPi, and then in turn hook it to the iPad. The RPi would provide a number of virtual midi connections to the iPad. Each of the vintage gear would be tethered through the RPi and the virtual connections. This would form the baseline and could be used to measure overall lag through the setup.

SynthBoost Project #2 - A Midi Router - Translator - Patcher

It occurred to me that I might be approaching the SynthBoost project the wrong way.  I have been exploring the possibility of augmenting my DW-8000 synthesizer with a Raspberry Pi to do various new things.  But what I think I really want is something in the middle that performs a whole bunch of functions.  If I use the RPi as a midi router, then I might have a better shot at success.  I have thoughts about setting up my equipment as shown in the following diagram:

In order to do this I would need the Raspberry Pi to act as a midi-router.  First of all I wanted to see if plugging in the 4x4 midi switch and the iRig would show up separately.  In order to see if the new iRig Pads would work on the RPi, I ran a python program after plugging the USB cable into one of the ports.

pygame.init()
pygame.midi.init()

for id in range(pygame.midi.get_count()):
print pygame.midi.get_device_info(id)

This gave me the following sequence:

('ALSA', 'Midi Through Port-0', 0, 1, 0)
('ALSA', 'Midi Through Port-0', 1, 0, 0)
('ALSA', 'iRig PADS MIDI 1', 0, 1, 0)
('ALSA', 'iRig PADS MIDI 1', 1, 0, 0)

This tells me that it is possible to interface to the iRig Pads device from my Raspberry Pi.  This shows that the ALSA is capable of accessing the midi interfaces.  When I plugged in the 4x4 midi switch and the 1x1 midi adapter, the items also showed up after running this same python program.  Now I am in a better position to figure out a solution.  I have been looking a a number of software solutions, most notably mididings.  Mididings is python based and uses the ALSA and JACK to its advantage.  I have not setup mididings on the RPi yet, but I hope to do that this week.

More information later.