I’ve been playing round with the excellent pianohat and getting the interfaces between Sunvox and Yoshimi working. Everything is great - except that I can’t get the"instrument" button to do anything.
It has code behind it in the example midi-piano.py and I tried to trace this through midi-python to the ALSA sequencer library behind that, but I can’t workout exactly what it is supposed to do.
Is there some configuration I need to do in either Sunvox or Yoshimi to allow the button to select instruments or patches within these synths? Or should it perform some other function when the pianohat is acting as a MIDI controller?
Thanks very much.
Ahoy! You seem to have got everything right up to this point. There is, however, one gotcha:
The Yoshimi installed from Apt does not support the “patch change” MIDI control message.
This is really frustrating, because it’s a bit of a faff to compile from source. I have a list of requirements which I can grab off my workstation on Monday, but for the time being the source is here, and you should be able to get it to compile pretty easily by failing your way through each requirement, looking up what it needs, installing and repeating ( or err, reading the instructions possibly, which I have a bad habit of not doing ):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/yoshimi/files/1.3/
If you don’t mind waiting, I’ll release a binary for Yoshimi that you can just drop over the apt version to save compiling it yourself. I don’t like doing this normally, as it’s a shonky way to distribute software, but this is one of those occasions where I think it’s worth having the latest and greatest.
So, yes, it works! And also, awesome to hear you’re enjoying it. I have to tear myself away when I’m working on it.