rtpmidid VS Conkey

rtpmidid[1]. After getting some hardware synthesizers and wanting to connect them without using a computer.. but being able to use them too using the computer I stumbled upon with rtpmidi the protocol and it ticked all the boxes I needed. I could connect all my gear to a raspberry pi, use ALSA sequencer to connect devices to each other with another of my programs AseqRC[2], and then use my synths from my DAW without touching any cable.

So after a fast prototype I created rtpmidid and I'm quite happy on how it works.

And it also helps with the USB ground loop noise that it seems unavoidable some times.

For some time I had even two Orange Pis connected to two sections of my gear, using USB gadget support so my MPC One could speak rtpmidi. MPC One has support to connect as host to MIDI devices, but as guest (connect to the computer) only in controlled mode which is not what I needed to convert my MIDI tracks to my DAW.

[1] https://github.com/davidmoreno/rtpmidid

My hope is that they finish the MIDI 2.0 rtpmidi protocol, and that starts to be truly used in real hardware, not half used as current rtpmidi.

This would allow easy connectivity with very low latency over normal LAN, including switches, power over Ethernet...

Disclaimer: I created a rtpmidi implementation for linux https://github.com/davidmoreno/rtpmidid

I've been using rtp-midi, using rtpmidid and it's working fine.

I'm trying to figure out how to use rtpmidid by David Moreno with my iConnectivity Mio XL. Just running rtpmidid makes all ports show up in Carla and in Reaper, but no MIDI seems to be sent. In Bitwig i can't even see the ports. Maybe because it uses jackmidi and rtpmidid uses alsamidi?

Most of my programs were written for my own use, including:

• A keyboard layout to type numerous non-English letters, punctuation marks and mathematical symbols, originally for Windows but subsequently ported to Linux and Mac [https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey]

• A ‘sound change applier’ for my hobby of language construction, to simulate the process of historical sound change [https://bradrn.com/brassica/]

• A small browser extension to save the full text of all webpages I visit, and a local client to search the database [not open-sourced, apologies!]

The first two have gained a few other users since being released, but I’m pretty sure I’m still the one who uses them the most!

I made my own crossplatform multilingual layout [0]. Although it’s based on QWERTY, it shouldn’t be hard to remap the Linux and Mac versions to any other base layout, since they’re autogenerated from the Windows version.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

The biggest one for me is undoubtedly my custom keyboard layout Conkey [0], which I use constantly (including for typing this very comment). I hate the way the base US layout tends to get distorted in other keyboard layouts with good support for non-ASCII characters, so Conkey had the explicit goal of retaining that basic unshifted layout. I’ve also ended up porting Conkey to Mac and Linux — and given that I’m slowly switching from Windows to Linux, at least the Linux ports have ‘scratched my own itch’ too, which is nice.

Also, I made a utility to archive the full text of every website I view and store it in a SQLite database for searching. It’s proven pretty useful when I want to find something I saw a while ago and then forgot. (I haven’t attempted to open-source it, though — it consists of three entirely separate components, two of which were a pain to set up. I must try to get it into a more usable state one of these days.)

What else… my sound change applier [1], perhaps? Not that I use it very much, because I only need it on those occasions when I want to do some conlanging, which I haven’t had much time for recently. Actually, sound change appliers strike me as being very much a ‘scratch own itch’ type of project in general… sometimes it feels like every conlanger has written their own, and no two can agree on a nice design. Everyone just has their own unique preferred way of doing things.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

For a ~50-year-old program, Emacs’s support for multilingual input — and really, it’s all-round flexibility — continually amazes me! For myself I prefer my own custom keyboard layout [0], because it works outside Emacs too, but I’d happily use Emacs’s own input methods if that would be sufficient.

(In fairness, I have found one weak spot, namely font support… I’ve used ‘unicode-fonts’ [1] with some success, but reportedly it doesn’t work with the latest Emacs. Ah well, it’s at least fairly rare that this becomes a problem in practice.)

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/rolandwalker/unicode-fonts

To port my keyboard layout [0] to OSX, I used ‘osxkb’ [1], which outputs an OSX keyboard layout bundle given a simple textual specification file. It was originally created specifically to port Conkey to OSX, but should be entirely usable for other purposes as well.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

> But instead, we're dealing with Latex - a language that overcomplicates the most basic features such as fonts, tables and special characters.

I can’t really argue with the rest of your post, but in my experience this is incorrect. Fonts and special characters are both trivial if you use XeTeX, and tables, though slightly clumsy, are still pretty easy. As an example, see the documentation I wrote for https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey, which makes extremely heavy use of all three features. (As documentation for a keyboard layout, it uses characters from pretty much every corner of Unicode, and accompanying tables of many shapes and sizes to show how to type these characters; I needed to use Gentium in order to render all these characters, with Times New Roman as a fallback. I found that LaTeX could ably handle all of these complecations.)