MIDI over Bluetooth

Is is possible with the current software to use Bluetooth MIDI devices? I would like to use a BT MIDI connection the an iPad. I’m not aware about the technical details, but I would guess it is just a serial connection over BT.

As long as the USB dongle is accepted by the underlying Linux, it should work. How about latency in BT?

Regards, Holger

The RBPi3 has an integrated BT interface, but it’s disabled by default in Zynthian for compatibility problems with the standard serial port:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=91&t=201350#p1253292

If you don’t need the standard MIDI serial ports, you could re-enable the integrated BT interface (be aware that if your zynthian case is metallic, you would have a weak signal outside).

Regards,

So the MIDI implementation just uses the serial port? There is no additional driver needed? I’ll test if I can get this working.

The serial port baud-rate is adjusted for fitting the MIDI specification. It’s a kernel “hack” for the RBPi that you can enable from the “/boot/config.txt”. I never tried to do it in a desktop PC.

Regards

@jofemodo, in case if we use usb bluetooth le dongle, the problem will stay the same — it will not live together with MIDI ?

Hi @dhrupadiya!

MIDI over bluetooth is not currently supported by zynthian. We need to do some research, test the raw technology on Zynthian and finally, integrate everything for easy use and configuration.

Documentation about it is scarce because the implementation is quite recent, so we will be surfing the cutting edge, but i would like to see that integrated on zynthian, of course!!

These are the more useful links i’ve found:

And the code itself:

As you can see, we need to learn how to use and integrate this “bluez” thing :wink:

@dhrupadiya, you could start by creating a “feature request” in our issue tracking system:

I’m pretty sure that somebody will catch the task and earn some zynthian reputation points :wink:

Regards,

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@jofemodo, as always your feedback is fast and positive !
Will follow up as recommended :slight_smile:

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I also plan to look into this. I have created a couple of Arduino based BLE Peripherals and it would be great to add the BLE support to Zynthian.

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Please, give some examples of BLE applications for zynthian … i want to believe! :wink:

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Ahhh! And welcome to the Zynthian community, @jiri!! :wink:

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Hello guys, first update on this topic is rather sad - The Bluetooth is unfortunately disabled on purpose, because of the Hifiberry. Once enabled it makes the Zynthian box very unstable (lots of noises in the sound, flash appears on the screen all the time, etc.)

So I need to give it a second try with a Bluetooth dongle…

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You are walking the land of Dragons, my friend. Go forward and tell us your adventures!! :wink:

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Just remember to leave a physical path out for your messaging back to us in case your attempts to send updates wirelessly get eaten by those dragons :-).

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Any progress in this topic? Midi over Bluetooth? Would be just plain awesome!

It would be convenient but what about latency? Bluetooth is not known for its real time performance.

No progress yet, but we already have all we should need:

http://www.bluez.org/

So, please, feel free to try it. I will be very happy of integrating the bluez stack, but i have no time of doing the research & testing …

Regards,

We’re talking here midi-over-bt, not audio-over-bt. Using midi BLE since the first comes, and never felt any annoying latency. Of course it has some, but it’s almost negligent.

What in two-three words is the installation process of this on Zyn? Using SSH? Or some other way?

P.S.: Found this topic -
https://wiki.zynthian.org/index.php/Debugging_MIDI
Will try by that example, think it’s the same process.

Did anyone get this working? Is it just a question of installing blues and connecting via command line?