midi out not working on both hardware and timidity

[jamesbond]

System Config
========
Motherboard: nForce 405 with MCP61 onboard soundcard, Dual core AMD64 X2.
Midi Interface: Edirol UM-1 USB
Ubuntu: Ubuntu Studio Gutsy 7.10, amd64 architecture, with realtime kernel (default installed)

Problem: System cannot play midi file using aplaymidi & audacious - both to external MIDI keyboard & to internal timidity port.

To be exact:
=======
1. aplaymidi -p 20:0 xxx.mid (where port 20:0 represents Edirol, connected to a keyboard) - stopped with no sound, until terminated with Ctrl-C
2. aplaymidi -p 128:0 xxx.mid (whre port 128:0 represents timidity port) - stopped with no sound, until terminated with Ctrl-C
3. Running AconnectGUI while aplaymidi is playing shows aplaymidi without any port in the display.
4. Same problem when audacious midi-plugin is configured to use ALSA back-end. If set to the alsa back-end (to either Edirol or timidity), trying to play midi file doesn't produce any sound, and hangs audacious until Ctrl-C. Audacious set to use fluidsynth back-end works beautifully, so it's not audacious or midi-plugin problem.
5. MIDI input is not a problem.
6. Running Jack and QSynth doesn't help --- though the port is visible, trying to use aplaymidi -p xxx (where xxx is the port of QSynth) produce exactly the same problem.

7. The only application that can successfully output MIDI to either Edirol, Timidity, or QSynth is Rosegarden.
8. With the same hardware, problem does not exist in earlier Ubuntu Studio Feisty 7.04 32-bit, and other Linuxes 32-bit (Puppy Linux) or 64-bit (64Studio amd64 works fine).

9. running timidity directly from command line (timidity -in xxx.mid) of course works, but this bypass alsa and therefore is irrelevant.

Only change made to the system:
1. chrt is used to raise the audio-interrupt-priority to -91 (from default of -51 or something)
2. cpu power management changed to "performance" from originally "ondemand"
3. /etc/security/limits.conf --- "@audio nice -10" is added.

The above 3 changes is necessary to eliminate xruns (without them, xruns figure goes up to hundreds).

[jamesbond (jamesh-sg)]

Just updated to libasound2-1.0.14-ubuntu8 (from ubuntu7) in the hope that it is fixed.
Unfortunately, it isn't.

I tried with very simple application, pmidi (depends only on libasound2 and libc6) --- and same problem. It just hangs there not doing anything, no MIDI output, no sound at all.

Additional note: Rosegarden is the only application that somehow can run, and this doesn't depend on Jack at all. Rosegarden without jack (just to use it's sequencer capability) still produces MIDI output. Unfortunately, Rosegarden's MIDI file import (and therefore MIDI playing capability) is rather poor, and also it doesn't make much sense that one uses Rosegarden to play MIDI files ...

[jamesbond (jamesh-sg)]

Very strange, muse also works ... 8-O
how come the simpler tools doesn't work?

[jamesbond (jamesh-sg)]

Even seq24 and vkeybd works ... weird?

[ttoine (ttoine)]

May be because of the real time. can you try again with a higher latency ? (more than 80ms)

Toine

[jamesbond (jamesh-sg)]

Sorry - what latency? This problem manifests itself whether or not jackd is running. (For most tests, I didn't even use jackd).

All I'm trying to do is to output MIDI to my external keyboard (primarily), or to timidity daemon, through alsa port (20:0 and 128:0 in my case).
Several applications works: Rosegarden, Muse, Seq24, vkeybd ... but others doesn't, such as audacious, pmidi, aplaymidi ...

Thanks.