Re: sequencing ALSA ports and clients

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

Hi Richard,

At Wed, 10 Apr 2002 14:38:04 +0100,
Richard Bown wrote:
> 
> Ok, earlier I sent this question to LAD but this is probably a better place
> to be asking it.  Apologies if you've already seen it.
> 
> Basically I'm still confused about synth clients and ports.  My
> SBLive presents four synth ports as default.  I create a port and
> subscribe or connect_to a specfic SBLive port and client.  When I'm
> sequencing out to this port should I be multiplexing among the other
> ports to exploit the synth's full polyphony?

what do you mean exactly "full polyphony"?
if it means "playing tones with the same note number on the same
channel on the same port at the same time", then, no, emu10k1 and
sbawe drivers don't do this.
notes are exclusive on the channel, i.e. you can play only a single
note A on the channel 1.  but of course, notes A can be played on
different channels, or on different ports at the same time.

if a note on the port 1 is affected by another port, then it's a bug
of the driver (except the case when all 64 voices are exhausted).

well, it's not difficult at all to reimplement the driver to allow
multi-notes-on-a-channel, but i don't think it's common.


> Should I be adding to the ports myself or can I get away
> with just using the one?  If the latter then why are there four
> ports made available?  I'm sure there's a dunce's document someone
> can point me to! 

four ports are provided to support more than 16 channels.


ciao,

Takashi