I've read a debian bug complaining because VMPK fails to compile in FreeBSD (by the way, it will fail also in other Unix flavors, except maybe SGI Irix).
When I was planning VMPK, it was going to be a Linux only program, ALSA sequencer based. Indeed, there is still a test program in my aseqmm library using the same piano widget. Because I only needed limited functionality, I decided to try RtMIDI instead, which offers Windows and Mac OSX support. As Qt4 is also supported in these operating systems, the program was born multi-platform.
Maybe the number of supported platforms is going to grow in the future. That depends on RtMIDI. Any volunteer out there? The developer of RtMIDI, Gary P. Scavone, is very collaborative and kindly accepted the patches I've sent him in the past. About OSS, there is a note in the RtMIDI documentation saying that a decision was made to not include support for the OSS API. And there is no MIDI support in OSSv4. But there are more MIDI APIs, like Jack MIDI...
Vmpk is very nice and very useful. But it set me to thinking about going beyond useful to actively cool. First, and I think simply, it seems to me that it shouldn't be very difficult to allow controllers access to the (computer) keyboard, either as toggles or up/down pairs, for example. Second, and here's the outrageously cool part, I'm running on this brand new MacBook Pro, and it has a gestural mousepad, with 2D scrolling, pinch and rotate. It occurs to me that there could be a Grand Unified Control with w=rotate, x=horizontal, y=vertical and z=knob brightness [+ displayed value? It would be more 'natural' to use knob size, but that poses layout problems] possibilities (when you built one you'd just say which axes of motion it would support, so it really *would* be a superset of all existing controllers). Of course, lower bandwidth mice would need to use either more complex gestures or shift keys to provide the input channel....
ReplyDeleteFinally, of course, more flexible layout would be nice. But the proposal of something with 2D layout probably already implies this :).
And in case it wasn't clear: thanks for the great tool, it was just what I needed, when I needed it.