[L2Ork-dev] Desktop files

[Albert Graef]

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 3:09 AM, Ivica Ico Bukvic <ico.bukvic at gmail.com> wrote:
> This makes perfect sense. For starters, the easiest thing is to disable
> autoconnect of midi ports.

Ok, I did that now
(https://github.com/agraef/pd/commit/dcbb6371e51db268e206e0f89b13f2d28864e338).
In fact, I simply pulled the latest s_midi_alsa.c from the Pd git
repo, which also has a couple of other minor changes (apparently, they
removed a superflous #include of config.h, and also increased the ALSA
MIDI event size). I'll submit a pull request when I'm done testing
this.

> Then, adding a feature where one can re-create a
> number of midi ports inside pd-l2ork (if that is not already available), and
> saving overriding settings that take precedence over the desktop icon's.

I don't think that you can do that, because the -mididev command line
options (which are also what gets used in your desktop files) are
supposed to override whatever you set as the default in the startup
options in the .pdl2ork file. That's by design, and I wouldn't want to
see that changed.

There's also a kind of MIDI setup in the Media menu, but the number of
ports you configure there doesn't stick, apparently this is just for
dynamic changes while pd is running. So the only way to permanently
configure the MIDI ports is by adding the corresponding -mididev
options to the startup flags in the File/Startup dialog (or by editing
.pdl2ork manually).

Therefore I'd really like to see these options removed from the
desktop files. IMHO the proper place to set up defaults for the MIDI
ports is to add the corresponding options to the
/etc/pd-l2ork/default.pdl2ork file. E.g., a line like the following
will do the trick:

flags: -alsamidi -mididev 1,2

Then the user can always override these settings with the ~/.pdl2ork file.

Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  aggraef at gmail.com
WWW:    https://plus.google.com/111193356966611167754