Midi sync with PD and Pisound! (ALSA midi not working?)

Apologies, I feel like I’m probably just missing a simple setup procedure, but I wondered if anyone could help me out by pointing my stupidity out to me!

I’ve just got hold of my pisound and I’m trying to use it to control a Korg Volca sample via midi. I need the pd patch to be synced up to the clock from ableton (the rest of my gear is slaved to that clock). So I have a patch with a basic sequencer which sends midi signal out to the korg as per the pattern in the patch, and it uses [midirealtimein] to receive clock.

My issue is that I’m struggling to get the midi to work. I have tried the following combinations to try to understand the problem.

  • ALSA midi, midi out only : No Midi is sent. Pure Data is stable.
  • ALSA midi, clock in and midi out: One flash showing the start stop message into the pi, but nothing else is sent or received. Pure Data is stable.
  • OSS midi, midi out only : Midi is sent. But timing is off, and I need to be able to sync to ableton’s clock signal. Pure Data is stable.
  • OSS midi, clock in and midi out : Midi is received and sent, but PD is not stable - after about 20 seconds either it just falls over and locks up, or it presents me a First in First Out midi overflow message and then locks up.

What is going wrong?
In theory, ALSA looks like the better approach, but I am not able to make it work - Is there something I need to do for alsa midi setup with the pisound?
If I were to get it working, and then I wanted also to plug in a USB midi controller into the pi as well, what extra would I need to do to make it work, with either the OSS midi or the ALSA midi setup?

Thanks for any help you guys can provide!

If it helps, I’m running with a model b raspberry pi 2 (1gb), with a standard raspbian OS.

Hi, for ALSA I think you need to use aconnect (command line) or aconnectgui to make the virtual MIDI connections between the software and hardware MIDI.

Thanks @Giedrius!

Looking at the aconnect settings, these are the midi ins and outs I have on the pi (below), I can see the hardware midi from the pisound, but what about the software midi part? Do I have to create a virtual midi port for that?

image

Sorry! What was I thinking - of course the ports aren’t there, I hadn’t opened PD. facepalm

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