[Vm-dev] re: Mac OS Cocoa MIDI Plugin

Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda at gmail.com
Tue May 17 18:44:26 UTC 2016


Hi Craig,

On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 6:22 AM, Craig Latta <craig at blackpagedigital.com>
wrote:

>
>
> Hi Eliot--
>
> > recently the Cog VM on Mac OS X moved to Cocoa, the Objective-C API
> > for the platform, leaving behind the old Carbon C API.  There is some
> > backward compatibility support but it is gradually being deprecated by
> > Apple.  One victim is the MIDIPlugin which was written against a
> > ComponentManager API that, while Apple docs say is only deprecated,
> > has actually disappeared.  Consequently the MIDIPlugin support
> > (see http://www.squeakvm.org/svn/squeak/branches/Cog/platforms
> > /iOS/plugins/MIDIPlugin) needs completely rewriting to use Cocoa
> > APIs.  I've recently changed the build so that the MIDIPlgin is built
> > externally, which will make it easier to work on; one doesn't need to
> > build the entire VM, only the plugin.  I'm looking for volunteers who
> > a) love music/know MIDI
> > b) are happy programming at the Objective-C level using command-line
> > builds and perhaps Xcode, but more immediately lldb for debugging.
> >
> > If interested, reply to vm-dev and we can continue discussions there;
> > there are folks that can help with Mac OS support, but no one I know
> > of that has time to write this rather important plugin for multi-
> > media.  It would be a great shame to lose MIDI on Mac.
>
>      Perhaps this is an opportunity to reduce the platform code fanout a
> bit. I've had good results with Squeak MIDI before on Mac, Windows, and
> Linux, by making a VM plugin from the platform-independent PortMedia
> libraries (PortAudio and PortMidi), at [1]. Perhaps it would make sense
> to use PortMedia in combination with FFI/Alien these days.
>

I'm a bit wary of using it on linux because it claims to be implemented
above ALSA and IME ALSA is poor, especially w.r.t. signals. But it looks
like a good solution for Mac and Win.

Is there anything to stop you following Bert's suggestion of reimplementing
the MIDIPlugin's support in terms of PortMIDI?



> -C
>
> [1] http://portmedia.sourceforge.net
>
> --
> Craig Latta
> Black Page Digital
> Amsterdam
> craig at blackpagedigital.com
> +31 6 2757 7177 (SMS ok)
> + 1 415 287 3547 (no SMS)
>

_,,,^..^,,,_
best, Eliot
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/attachments/20160517/22b67e4c/attachment-0001.htm


More information about the Vm-dev mailing list