0.6.2 on Linux - Not sending MIDI

[whoman321]

Hello!

beat-link-trigger-0.6.2
Ubuntu 18.04
Oracle Java 15

I'm not able to output MIDI with beat-link-trigger-0.6.2 on Ubuntu 18.04 (also tested on Debian Stretch).
Everything appears to work properly in beat-link-trigger, but when I try "Simulate->Activate" on a trigger, there is no midi sent, and the log doesn't show any errors.

I decided to try Oracle's JRE (Ubuntu comes with openJDK by default), so I downloaded the Oracle JDK version 15, same thing. Everything seems to be working, but no MIDI is sent out.

2020-Dec-04 17:15:24 INFO [beat-link-trigger.logs:80] - Beat Link Trigger version 0.6.2-1-0xe8eb built Wed May 13 01:26:08 UTC 2020
2020-Dec-04 17:15:24 INFO [beat-link-trigger.logs:81] - Java version 15, Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM, Oracle Corporation
2020-Dec-04 17:15:24 INFO [beat-link-trigger.logs:82] - Operating system version Linux 5.4.0-54-generic
2020-Dec-04 17:15:24 INFO [beat-link-trigger.logs:83] - Log files can grow to 200000 bytes, with 5 backlog files.
2020-Dec-04 17:15:24 INFO [beat-link-trigger.core:177] - Beat Link Trigger starting.
2020-Dec-04 17:15:25 INFO [beat-link-trigger.core:97] - Trying to go online, Use Real Player Number? false
2020-Dec-04 17:15:26 INFO [beat-link-trigger.core:114] - Giving up attempt to go online, user wants to continue offline.
2020-Dec-04 17:15:46 INFO [beat-link-trigger.triggers:380] - Reporting activation: Note 12 on channel 3
2020-Dec-04 17:15:49 INFO [beat-link-trigger.triggers:407] - Reporting deactivation: Note 12 on channel 3

I've tested with 3 different USB Midi adapters. Beat link Trigger does detect them and lists them on the "Output" field, but nothing is sent. These MIDI adapters work 100% fine with other linux software on my laptop.

I added '-verbose' to the java command, and tested again. Here's the lines of output that occur when I click on Activate.

[58.886s][info][class,load] beat_link_trigger.util$create_device_update_packet$fn__5822 source: file:/home/tangent/Downloads/beat-link-trigger-0.6.2.jar
[58.887s][info][class,load] clojure.core$map_indexed$mapi__8548 source: file:/home/tangent/Downloads/beat-link-trigger-0.6.2.jar
[58.887s][info][class,load] clojure.core$map_indexed$mapi__8548$fn__8549 source: file:/home/tangent/Downloads/beat-link-trigger-0.6.2.jar
[58.888s][info][class,load] sun.awt.X11.XQueryTree source: jrt:/java.desktop
[58.889s][info][class,load] overtone.midi$midi_find_device$fn__880 source: file:/home/tangent/Downloads/beat-link-trigger-0.6.2.jar

These lines only appear the first time I click Activate. Subsequent clicks don't produce anything on the verbose output.

Just based on that last line, I'm thinking maybe overtone was having trouble connecting to the USB MIDI adapter, so I searched for info about overtone's midi-clj on Linux, and from what I'm finding it works perfectly fine on Ubuntu 18.04.

Is there anything I could do to debug this problem further?
Am I using the wrong Java version?

Thank you for your time

[brunchboy]

Hi! I’m sorry you’ve run in to this, but unfortunately I can’t share any insight. It sounds like you are doing everything right. In your verbose output, I don’t see any evidence of problems; those lines just show that some classes are being loaded. That will happen only the first time you try to use them. As far as Beat Link Trigger is concerned, everything seems to be working fine. The line [58.889s][info][class,load] overtone.midi$midi_find_device$fn__880 source: file:/home/tangent/Downloads/beat-link-trigger-0.6.2.jar probably reflects the first time the anonymous function inside midi-clj’s midi-find-device function is being used. (Clojure functions are represented as Java classes so they can be passed around as first-class language constructs and used with higher-order functions.)

I would suggest trying to write a minimal Java program to send MIDI to those devices, and see if you can get it working, without the added layers of Clojure, midi-clj, and Beat Link Trigger. If not, then you can open a support case with Oracle (or whichever Java distribution you end up trying to use), or with your MIDI interface vendors. If that does work, then we can start adding layers and seeing where the failure is occurring. For example, see if it’s possible to write a short standalone Clojure program to send a MIDI note to the device.

I don’t have any MIDI interfaces or Ubuntu systems handy to try to help investigate this, I’m afraid.

[brunchboy]

Perhaps this weekend I could try hooking up one of my USB MIDI controllers to my Raspberry Pi, and see if I can get one of the buttons to light up from a BLT trigger as a check that Linux MIDI can sometimes work. That wouldn’t help much understand why it isn’t working in your case, though.

Taking a step back, what is the integration you are trying to accomplish? Is there an interface other than MIDI, such as perhaps OSC or some other IP-based protocol, that you might be able to try instead?

[whoman321]

Thank you so much for your quick response, and willingness to help!

I've done very little practical Java programming in the past (I mostly use C, C++, and Python) but will try your suggestion of making a super simple java app to test with midi output, just to make sure it's not a problem with Java, and to take it one layer at a time.

If you do end up testing it with your RPi, yes that would be great to know if that works or not.

Unfortunately, at the moment, MIDI is the only interface I am trying to use with beat-link-trigger, as the main piece of hardware I'm trying to trigger is currently MIDI only. Tomorrow I'll see if I can set up some sort of OSC listener to test it with, but that would just be for debugging.

Once I get MIDI triggers working, in the future I'm definitely looking at using some other hardware/software that would possibly use OSC or even some of your custom trigger implementations (perhaps Beyond or grandma2), but for now MIDI is what I really need.

I'll report back in the next day or two about my luck with the pure java midi output test.

Thanks again!

[whoman321]

Found this example which locates a MIDI device, and then outputs the contents of a MIDI file.
Tested it on Linux... It works, so it's not a Java issue.

import javax.sound.midi.*;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.Scanner;

public class midiOut {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, MidiUnavailableException, InvalidMidiDataException
    {

        while(true) {
            //List Midi Devices
            MidiDevice.Info[] midiInfo = MidiSystem.getMidiDeviceInfo();
            int i = 0;
            for (MidiDevice.Info info : midiInfo) {
                System.out.println(i + ": " +info.getName());
                i+=1;
            }
            //Select Device
            Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in);
            int input = in.nextInt();

            if(input == -1)
            {
                break;
            }
            //Get Device and Open it
            MidiDevice selectedDevice = MidiSystem.getMidiDevice(midiInfo[input]);
            System.out.println(selectedDevice.getDeviceInfo().getName());
            selectedDevice.open();
            //Get Sequencer and Receiver, load the File and start playing
            Receiver receiver = selectedDevice.getReceiver();
            Sequencer sequencer = MidiSystem.getSequencer();
            sequencer.getTransmitter().setReceiver(receiver);
            sequencer.open();
            sequencer.setSequence(MidiSystem.getSequence(new File("/home/tangent/oneV/CDJ/JavaMidi/axel.mid")));
            sequencer.start();

            sequencer.addMetaEventListener(new MetaEventListener() {
                @Override
                public void meta(MetaMessage meta) {
                    if(meta.getType() == 47)
                    {
                        sequencer.close();
                    }
                }
            });

            while (sequencer.isOpen()){}
        }
    }
}

So now I've installed Clojure and Lein / lein-try, and will try to test MIDI hardware output in REPL.
Can you let me know which specific Clojure library is used in BLT? Overtone, or Midi-clj?

Edit:
I see, it's: [overtone/midi-clj "0.5.0"]
Will try it out and report back

[brunchboy]

That’s good news! And yes, midi-clj is from overtone.

[brunchboy]

I’m hugely curious about what is going on here.

[whoman321]

I'm having some trouble setting up a development environment with midi-clj 0.5.0 (Ubuntu can be finiky with specific package versions sometimes)

Currently with the defualt packages provided for Ubuntu 18.04, I can only get REPL (lein try) loaded with version 0.1 of the midi-clj library.

I will continue to troubleshoot why 0.5 of midi-clj is not available/working for my 'lein try' development environment, but in the meantime, if it is possible for you to create a .jar file with a simple clj application that does the following, that would allow me to further debug this problem regardless of my progress on resolving my development environment issues..

The USB MIDI adapter is named "CH345".
The midi-clj app would just need to set that device for MIDI out, then trigger a 'note' on that device:

midi-clj:

(use 'midi)

; Select midi input and output devices
; These functions bring up a GUI chooser window to select a midi port
(def keyboard (midi-in))
(def phat-synth (midi-out))

; Once you know the correct device names for your devices you can save the
; step of opening up the GUI chooser by putting a unique part of the name
; as an argument to midi-in or midi-out.  The first device with a name that
; matches with lookup is returned.
(def ax (midi-in "axiom"))

; Connect ins and outs easily
(midi-route keyboard phat-synth)

; Trigger a note (note 40, velocity 100)
(midi-note-on phat-synth 40 100)
(Thread/sleep 500)
(midi-note-off phat-synth 0)

I will continue to try to get my devel environment working with 0.5 of midi-clj, but if it's easy for you to create a jar file from the info specificed above (with version 0.5), please do so and I'll report back with my results immediately.

If you need any more info, please let me know.
Thank you again for your time.

[brunchboy]

I am a little confused, but perhaps that is because I’ve never heard of lein-try. Did you install leiningen itself? If so, then you should just be able to clone the Beat Link Trigger repository, cd into that directory, and type lein repl to end up at a REPL prompt with all of the libraries used by Beat Link Trigger, including the right version of midi-clj. Then at the REPL prompt, you can (require '[overtone.midi :as midi]) and then interactively try things like picking your interface, (def adapter (midi/midi-out)) (will pop up a GUI window to choose it), and then (midi/midi-note-on adapter 40 100).

If you really need me to build a smaller jar file, I could, but that is not a normal or effective way to do Clojure development and experimentation. Leiningen will use the Maven package management infrastructure to find the dependencies enumerated in the project’s project.clj file, independent of Ubuntu’s own package management ideas.

In your example above, I can’t see what’s in your project.clj or equivalent, but I can’t imagine one that would make the (use 'midi) expression work. (In general, use is deprecated these days in favor of the more explicit use of require and package aliases, to make it clear where functions are coming from, but even beyond that, I don’t see how use in your example is supposed to understand that midi refers to the package named overtone.midi.)

Also, these days the standard Clojure packages themselves have their own notions of dependency management, so if you want to avoid the complexity of Leiningen itself, I could put together an example of how to set up a minimal deps.edn file so you could use clj to open a REPL with access to midi-clj.

[brunchboy]

Oh, right, getting a REPL up in BLT requires Antora to be installed these days, so we might be better off pursuing the minimal deps.edn approach. I need to step away for a minute but I will work on putting together that example when I get a chance.

[brunchboy]

OK, version 1, which should allow me to build a jar if you need. With Leiningen installed, create a new directory, cd into it, and create the file project.clj with the following content:

(defproject midi-test "0.1.0-SNAPSHOT"
  :description "Experimenting with midi-clj"
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.10.1"]
                 [overtone/midi-clj "0.5.0"]])

While still in a shell in that directory, run lein repl. That will open a REPL prompt, evaluating the following expressions should work for you:

(require '[overtone.midi :as midi])  ; Load midi-clj, alias as "midi".
(def adapter (midi/midi-out))  ; Use GUI to select adapter, bind to variable.
(midi/midi-note-on adapter 40 100)  ; Send a note to that adapter.
(midi/midi-note-off adapter 40)  ; Silence the note we sent (optional).

This works on my machine, does it for you? Next I will see about building an executable Jar from it in case you can’t install Leiningen for some reason.

[brunchboy]

OK, that was easy. By simply running lein uberjar I was able to create a jar for you that runs the REPL. Download this, unzip it (only because GitHub doesn’t recognize that jar files are already zip files) and then when you run java -jar followed by the path to the jar, you will get a REPL where you can test the above four expressions.

midi-test-0.1.0-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar.zip