Hi
I am new to Zynthian.
Reading the docs, the use of Qmidinet seems to be very simple. If qmidinet is set to on on 2 raspberries connected to the same network, a MIDI device connected on one device should be seen on the other. But in my case this is not happening. Otherwise, all it’s working, MIDI devices are properlly recognized on each device. I have no idea how I can debug further.
Thanks
Jean-David
Hi @domisol! Welcome to the wonderful land of Zynths.
I just got this working by enabling QMidiNet on both Zynthians then enabling the QMidiNet ports in MIIDI options->Ports (remembering to save). At first it didn’t seem to be working but when I opened the MIDI log and selected QMidiNet it started to work (coincidence?). Disabling the ports didn’t appear to stop it working which is rather odd. So I started again.
No need to enable the ports on the receive machine.
Hi @riban, thanks for the welcoming and for sharing your experience. I’ll give it a try just now…
Still no luck… I have even started with 2 fresh installs… May be I could try with RTP-MIDI but I understand I need a coordinator for the session. I don’t know how to do it from Zynthian, if ever doable.
You may also need to enable “Route MIDI to Output Ports”. Without this, MIDI input hits Zynthian modules but does not pass through to the output. I don’t know what you are trying to do exactly but if you want to play a MIDI controller physically connected to one Zynth and hear the results from another Zynth then this option is required.
RTP MIDI does require some coordination. It works well enough if you have RTP MIDI set up on your network already. I prefer to stick with the simpler QmidiNet. (I did have some occurrences of missed events when testing yesterday with the occasional stuck note. This should not happen on a wired network.)
Thanks Riban for helping me to sort this out. I’m trying to do exactly what you say. I’ll try asap to enable “Route MIDI to Output Ports” and get back to you. Regards! Jean-David
Our friend @wyleu has played with this quite a bit so may have some words of wisdom (although his wise words are often obscured by whimsical, meandering narration). He may have experience of its reliability. It uses multicast UDP so is a send and pray delivery mechanism - no guarantee of delivery or notification of failure but an un-saturated, hard-wired network with multicast compatible components (e.g. a single cable between zynths) should not have an issue if neither zynth is overloaded with other processing or network traffic. (I am fairly sure my tests were in such an environment but I was working on other stuff so maybe had some processes or network activity that might have caused my lost events.) I look forward to hearing your results.
It works!!! Thanks!!! “Route MIDI to Output Ports” was enabled on the sending side…
No latency at first look. Just tried a few minutes. But the problem is now that some notes keep stucked. On an organ (Aeolus) this is quite bad… I guess some “note off” message are beeing lost. I use a gigabit ethernet network…
I love this! I could use RTP Midi (as you said with a session initiator somewhere) but I’m not sure it would solve the problem. It also uses UDP. Last week I tried RaveloxMIDI (nothing to do with Zynthian) which is a linux implementation of RTP Midi and I also had a few missing note off message…
There is a wiki page about this on which I just fixed a few typos and added a remark about midi output.
Wyleu is the “Vinicio Capossela” (musician, poet, philosopher, madman) of the Zynthian…
A legend!
Qmidinet, can it also be installed on Mac?
This morning I played my minimal Zynthian connected with Qmidinet to the Zynthian that was in another room… I got excited …
good news! any lost MIDI message (like note off) on the way?
No loss of notes or sustain pedal but a few very light clicks… but I’m using my minimal Zynthian2 to receive the data… and I don’t want it to be underpowered… (but the underpower symbol doesn’t appear)
Another info…
If I use Sfizz Rhodes stereo as the sound on the minimal Zynthian I have the clicks, if I use Sfizz DX7 I have no problem…
qmidinet has settled down from it’s nacent howl around issues several years ago…
IT didn’t auto connect in the early days of the recent greenheart release, but this isn’t an issue now.
Frankly, from my perspective, it just works. I frequently use it as a way of not having to connect external devices of various sorts directly to a specific zynth, using a remote machine as a MIDI head amongst a pool of 16 MIDI channels across the zynth pool.
Reliable enough to not be amognst the early suspects when debugging issues.
I am getting frequent missing events, most evident when a note-off event is lost resulting in hanging notes. I can see the note-off message sent from the source but not arriving at the destination (monitoring using Zynthian MIDI log). I updated to the latest (late spring release) version on both machines (depends on libqt5svg5 which is not installed on Zynthian by default) and I see no improvement - still missed messages.
The two Zynthians are connected via a Netgear switch with other devices also connected but fairly low traffic.
It is of course the nature of UDP to be unreliable but I would have expected better behaviour than this.
I reserve a specific hub for it or better still wire directly between two machines.
Don’t use wifi.
