Re: Sequencer documentation follow-up

[Chris Cannam <cannam@all-day-breakfast.com>]

Takashi Iwai wrote:
> At Sun, 8 Jun 2003 22:06:30 -0400,
> Drake Wilson wrote:
> 
>>... I have a draft, or part thereof.  It is in similar spirit to the
>>module overviews in the API reference, and I hope it to be of some
>>use, if not optimal.
>>[...]

I missed this until now.  Just to add that the meanings of the
various SND_SEQ_PORT_TYPE flags were covered in a discussion on
this list a few weeks ago.

It seems that the SND_SEQ_PORT_TYPE_* flags describe the sort of
events that a port understands and not necessarily what it does
with them.  The discussion here arose from a desire to query
these flags in order to attempt to distinguish MIDI soft synths
and on-card hardware synths from other MIDI applications such as
sequencers: it turns out that this is not possible.

For example, I believe it turned out that PORT_TYPE_APPLICATION
indicates a port expecting application-specific events, not just
a port that happens to belong to a software application.  That is,
a MIDI soft synth would not necessarily be expected to set this
flag.  Similarly, PORT_TYPE_SYNTH indicates that the port has the
ability to do (non-MIDI) direct synthesis, and again a MIDI soft
synth or a driver for a soundcard MIDI synth would not be expected
to set this flag unless it was also capable of direct synthesis.
So "port is attached to a synthesizer device" is unfortunately an
inadequate and misleading description for PORT_TYPE_SYNTH, as
ports attached to MIDI synth devices will generally not have this
flag set.  I found all this most confusing, but that's probably
because I don't really know anything about non-MIDI clients.

Look for the subject "Sequencer port type flags" in the archives
(in early May this year) for more details.


Chris



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