I've been reading HOWTOs and FAQs and other all caps alphabet documents over and over for the past couple of months, but I just can't get my midi port to function. (And I mean the midi port, for talking to my synths, not FM synth on a sound card.) I have RedHat 7.1 with a SoundBlaster 128 PCI (and I tried a SB16 PCI before that) and I can't get the midi port to activate. /dev/sequencer just doesn't respond.

The specific error message I get when I try to start my sequencer (Jazz) is

/dev/sequencer2 or /dev/music: Device not configured
/dev/sequencer2 or /dev/music: Device not configured
/dev/music: Device not configured

The device files exist and the permissions & major/minor are correct.

One thing I noticed is that sndconfig doesn't seem to install the midi drivers by default, so I've tried inserting sound.o and uart401.o by hand but although the modules load without errors the device still doesn't work.

I tried turning off aRtsd to see if that was conflicting, but it made no difference.

So is there any way at all to activate the midi port? Am I going to have to switch to ALSA? I will if I've got some hope that it will work. Right now I'm keeping an older ISA based computer sitting around just to use the ISA SB16 that's in it, and I'm getting rather desperate at this point.

Thanks

Eris

From /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound/es1371,

> From /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound/es1371,
> This soundcard does not have any hardware MIDI synthesizer;

I know this - that was one of the first files I ever read. But I'm not trying to activate any 2-bit synth on a soundcard - I'm trying to activate the MIDI data port. MIDI is a data protocol for sending note on/off messages and other control codes to musical instruments, and the Sound Blaster joystick port also serves as a MIDI data port to allow you to control an external synthesizer with your computer.

What I want to do is connect my Roland and Alesis keyboard synths to my computer so I can sequence music that's more complicated than I can play solo. To do this I need to activate the MIDI port on the SB. With earlier SB16 cards I'd just insmod sound.o, insmod uart401.o and away I'd go, and all the documentation I've found for the SB16PCI and SB128PCI says that this ought to work for them as well. (Actually, most of the documentation seems to assume that the MIDI drivers are installed by default when you run sndconfig. Manual installation is only rarely mentioned.)

Of course, theory is often easier than reality and I've hit a brick wall with this one. I'm about to try installing a different distro to see if this is just a bug in RH 7.1.

Eris

Aha..ok, my bad.
Have a look at this page for a guide to alsa drivers and a sb128 and this page for linux sound/midi news and links.