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Comment by yellowapple

8 days ago

Perfect timing. I'm expecting to get my hands on a MOTU MIDI Express XT from my local Guitar Center within the next couple days (I paid for it when it arrived there a couple weeks ago, but they have a mandatory waiting period on used equipment to make sure it ain't stolen), which unfortunately uses some weird proprietary protocol instead of class-compliant MIDI-over-USB — so any use over USB from my PCs (nearly all of which are running Linux, OpenBSD, Haiku, or something other than Windows or macOS) is a no-go. This is okay for my immediate use cases (I just need it to route between some synth modules and controllers, without necessarily needing the PC to do any processing in-between), but it'd be cool to get the PC side of things working, too.

There's an existing out-of-tree Linux driver¹ that looks promising, but AFAICT it only does the bare minimum of exposing the MIDI ports for use with e.g. JACK, and it's also unclear how stable it is and whether it really does support the XT (the README says the kernel panic got fixed, but there are open issues about it; the README says the XT's supported, but there are open issues about that, too). I'd like to be able to create new routing presets and stuff like what the proprietary companion app can do, and I'd also like to be able to use the thing without needing to shove extra drivers into my kernel, and I'd also like to be able to use the thing on my OpenBSD and Haiku boxen, so I've been perusing LibUSB docs since a userspace USB driver that then presents the relevant MIDI ports and some tooling to reroute the MIDI ports as desired seems like something useful. This article happens to be exactly what I've been looking for w.r.t. a starting point for such a userspace driver.

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¹: https://github.com/vampirefrog/motu

5 comments

yellowapple

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grawlinson  8 days ago

I packaged that driver on the AUR, since I’ve got the same device. I can’t get the binary blob to work (admittedly, I haven’t tried very hard) and it’s not high on my list of priorities so I’m okay using it as a dumb MIDI tool.

ryanmcbride  8 days ago

I could be misremembering but I believe the guitar center waiting period isn't _just_ to make sure it's not stolen (I kind of doubt they're actually doing anything like an investigation) but also because legally their used equipment side of business has to operate like a pawn shop, in that they aren't allowed to sell something they've "bought" until after the window for the pawner to buy it back expires.