Hi,

First of all I want to say thank you to this forum community. I have been doing Pd for a few years, so still total newbie, but I have made a lot of progress due to the immeasurable amount of knowledge and help from this community.

I got a disk image from this thread:

https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/11626/pd-48-on-raspberry-pi-3/14

I have a Raspberry Pi 3, running Pure Data .49.

In my previous disk image Pd automatically recognized my midi controller. But in this new one Pd does not see my controller at all. I saw another post detailing my exact problem, but it was not solved. I would guess that others that must be having this problem, or that it will be coming up going forward. I'll go into detail, but this thread details a very similar issue:

https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/11485/rpi-no-midi-input-or-output-found

Also, my disk image has Jack installed on it. After spending hours trying to figure out Jack, and qjackctlm (with zero success), I thought I would just ask here. I'd rather not use Jack if possible as everything was works fine without it on my other disk image.

When I launch Pd, with my midi controller plugged in, it does not recognize it. Either in OSS-Midi or ALSA.

In the terminal, if I run: amidi -l

I see my controller MIDI/MOCA for LUFA MIDI 1

So I think everything is fine with the Pi.

If I run: pd -listdev in terminal I see my midi controller being recognized as an audio input and output device, but it says:

no midi input devices found
no midi output devices found

so it does not see my interface as a midi device

Any suggestions at all on my to get Pd to see my midi controller? I'm kind of stuck and have tried everything I can think of.

Thank you again for any input.

You can try this out:
launch Pd with -alsamidi
typing in a terminal aconnect -lio will give you a list of all MIDI devices
find your controller and Pd's MIDI input port and type
aconnect 'Your Controller Name':0 'Pure Data':0
Note that if your controller is not a single word, you need the single quotes, the same way 'Pure Data' is written. 0 is your MIDI controller's output port and Pd's input port. These depend on your system, so make sure you fill in the correct numbers there.

check in Pd that you get input from your controller, it should work.

@alexandros Thank you for your reply! Interesting. This worked. I had to launch Pd first then type in: aconnect 'Your Controller Name':0 'Pure Data':0

And that worked for Pd to receive midi data from my controller, but it didn't work for my controller to get messages from Pd (I have leds on my controller).

After some research I found aconnectgui, which is a gui to make midi connections.
After you install it you can launch it by typing aconnectgui in the terminal.

So I could connect everything that way, but that still won't work for me as I am going to use my Pi headless.

After more googling, I found I can just type the name of the midi client number in aconnect to make my connections. So for me that was:

aconnect 20:0 128:0

this connected my controller (20) to Pd (128)

To get Pd's midi out to my controller I had to do:

aconnect 128:1 20:0

Took a while but I figured it out.

Also, If my controller is plugged in when I turn on the Pi it is client number 20. If I plug it in later it's another number, so to keep it consistent I will always plug it in before i turn on the Pi.

It seems there is no way to save all these connections in Pd correct? My controller still is not showing up in the midi menu of Pd. So I guess I have to create a shell script or something to be fired up after Pd launches. If there is a way to save these setting in Pd please let me know.

Thank you for your help. If I can figure out this last bit I'll be set.

Using controller names like 'Pure Data' instead of 20, is more consistent, since these numbers are subject to change, depending on when you plug in a device, so I suggest you go for the names of the controllers and not their values.
You can do the following in a file:

#!/usr/bin/sh

pd -nogui -alsamidi -otherflags &
sleep 3
aconnect 'Controller':0 'Pure Data':0
aconnect 'Pure Data':1 'Controller':0

This will automate the process of launching Pd and connecting it to your controller via ALSA MIDI.

Then you can run this script from crontab. Type crontab -e (if it's the first time you edit crontab you'll be asked to choose an editor and will be prompted to use nano - I suggest using that if you're not familiar with other editors like vim) and at the end of the file type:

@reboot sleep 30 ; sh /path/to/your/script/script_name.sh

This will launch your script 30 seconds after the system boots.

Hi @alexandros. Thank you again for your help. I got everything to work. But I have to say, 30 seconds is a long time to wait, especially if you are on a stage and it's dead silent for that time.

Is there any way to speed this up or streamline it? Or save these settings in Pd. I tried a 10 second delay and that didn't work.

Here's my issue. Because I am using the Pi headless I have a python script that allows me to use buttons to open my Pd patch. Whenever I open a new patch the script quits Pd and opens it again, and opens my new patch. And I have to wait 30 seconds again for the midi connections to happen. Seems like there has to be a better, faster way around this. On Pd .46 I was able to save all the Midi settings. I don't know if I can't save them because of the Pi, or because of Pd.

Let me know what you think.

thanks, Nick

My suggestion was for when you boot up the Pi only. If you're opening Pd patches through Python, you should replace the command that launches Pd with a command that launches your Python script and open Pd from there. In that case you don't need to wait 30 seconds every time, only at boot time for the Python script to launch.
But why do you have to quit Pd and restart it? Can't you just close the patch and open a new one? There are internal messages in Pd that can do that.

I think what I'm going to attempt is to create a midi client with Jack.

Is there a way to do that in Terminal? Kind of convoluted, but when I boot up maybe I can make a midi connection between my controller and alsa midi, and between alsa midi and Jack.

Since I can save the midi connection between Jack and Pd that might work. I didn't want to use Jack because I can't really figure it out, but maybe I'll keep trying.

I finally figured out how to open it in terminal, but typing "jackd" I having a hard time finding a list of commands for jack though.