Ugh. TOTAL midi newbie here

[Febs]

Hello everybody and sorry in advance for the lame post, but I'm a total newbie about what matters everything MIDI. Well, actually also about piano playing. :)
I own a laptop with Ubuntu Linux and a yamaha P60 electronic piano.

Now, this piano booster looks VERY exciting; I can't imagine a funniest way to learn the piano. Great idea, and thank you for developing and maintaining it!

Beautiful.

The problem is, that I don't have any idea about how to connect the two things. I mean, first of it all, which MIDI to USB adapter to buy to fully enjoy the experience. What do you Ubuntu users out there recommends?
After that, I feel like it will be a pain to set up the software layer (don't know why...) but that will come next.

Thank you SO much!!!

Best regards

[danboid]

Hi Febs!

Cool program eh?

You should be able to use just about any USB MIDI cable to connect your keyboard- you can buy them off ebay for next to nothing. I'm lucky as I've got a fantastic, very cheap cable shop nearby where I got mine for £10. If it says it'll work on Windows and Mac without special drivers drivers then it should do exactly the same under Linux too- aren't USB standards fantastic when they're supported?

Setting up pianobooster to work as intended (ie in conjunction with a MIDI keyboard) is equally simple under Ubuntu as it is Windows and I should imagine this method to be plug n' play for Mac users too but I've not tried PB on a Mac yet. It can be a bit more hassle to use PB if you want to use a softsynth for playback instead of using your MIDI keyboard- but whats the point in that?

[Febs]

Thank you!

The second thing to do will be searching for MIDIs of VERY simple tunes :-P. Self-learner, old and slow here :)

[bjfs]

Hi, I'm using MIDI to USB cable like this http://www.emu.com/products/product.asp?category=610&subcategory=611&product=15188

Works like charm on both Windows and Linux (didn't try on Mac as I don't have one).

(had to use that because my soundcard didn't had a gameport and my previous cable was MIDI to gameport...)

And how to run it on Linux ? Well, ALSA (the sound driver set for Linux) should have a usb-midi kernel module (should autoload) and then you could connect the ALSA MIDI ports the right way.

If unsure on what you have connected on your USB host then type "lsusb" in your terminal.

The standard program for this is "aconnect", here's a link http://alsa.opensrc.org/Aconnect

There are friendlier GUI programs for this, but I've forgot how they were called ;-P

Cheers!

[danboid]

My usb midi port appears under

/dev/midi1

So you just open a terminal and type:

cat /dev/midi1

With your keyboard plugged in and turned on and you should see a stream of characters which changes when you push a key.

You can connect ALSA MIDI ports through qjackctl for one. Theres a similar app called qaconnect or something.

kmidimon is another useful linux MIDI monitoring app