• NetBSD

  • Musescore on NetBSD: MIDI in?

I have been using Musescore from pkgsrc for a while. I also have a Debian machine (because it has an inbuilt video card that doesn't like NetBSD) with which I use an older version of Musescore (Debian package manager). That machine has an attached MIDI keyboard for score composition. (I don't like entering notes and especially chords with the mouse).

Recently I did some rearranging and connected an old NetBSD machine (Pentium 4) to a better-suited piano, for score composition. Now I can get MIDI events by other software, but not Musescore. I had to rebuild Musescore with ALSA support just to get the MIDI Note Input option to turn on. I also tried Jack, which sees the piano, and Musescore, but I still get no MIDI events in Musescore.

Has anyone else gotten this to work? I hate to have to resort to Debian again.

It probably works if you use midirecord to generate a file ahead of time.

    nia true, but I'm hoping to not have to work that way. When I do this, I'm not actually playing the piece. In fact, usually I'm transcribing the music so I can practise it to get to the point of playing it.
    So I don't have timing accuracy at this point. Without that, Musescore editing will be more work than using the mouse for note entry.

    • Jay likes this.

      Well I'm embarrassed to say, I may just not have been patient enough. Apparently I was going down the right road. Building Musescore with jack support, and using jack with jack_umidi did the trick. I'm ecstatic to see this actually working; I had given up hope.

      After leaving everything running for several minutes and just pounding out chords, it suddenly started working. I expect this is due to low system resources.

        kc9udx several minutes

        Well, that's a huge latency. I hope it's only in the beginning and not that each chord that you play shows up on screen minutes later 🙂

            bsduck there isn't much latency after the first. There is some, but not an objectionable amount for me (for this purpose). I think there's always some in "step-time" input mode anyway. The important thing is single notes ending up as single notes and (even large) chords ending up as chords, which does work.