Pd midi on Fedora

A few days ago, my girlfriend asked me to set up PureData on her Fedora 11 box. Installing Pd was easy thanks to CCRMA. Making it work – not so much…

After countless failed attempts I came up with a simple yet working setup which can be implemented in about two minutes:

  1. install pd-extended, jack-audio-connection-kit and fluidsynth
  2. start JACK: jackd –realtime –silent -d alsa –midi-driver seq &
  3. start FluidSynth:
    fluidsynth -l -i -s -a jack -o synth.sample-rate=48000 /usr/share/soundfonts/default.sf2 &
  4. connect FluidSynth to ALSA:
    jack_connect fluidsynth:left alsa_pcm:playback_1
    jack_connect fluidsynth:right alsa_pcm:playback_2
  5. pd -rt -jack -alsamidi -midioutdev 1

I first tried to not use JACK because I thought it would clash with PulseAudio. Problem with this approach: Pd does not support PulseAudio natively and neither does FluidSynth in F11 (upstream supports it, but that is another sad story). So it’s either PCM sound or midi, but not both at the same time 🙁

Fortunately, JACK turned out to work great – but for normal desktop usage, I am still very happy to have PulseAudio 🙂