[Wine] Kontakt doesn't respond to Akai USB MIDI Keyboard

[Cosmo Lee]

Jordan:

Thanks much for your reply!  I actually tried using ALSA, but I couldn't get it to work.  But since you wrote that you got it working, I went back and 
started rooting around in winecfg and playing with it some more.  It turns out the problem was that the bit setting in the "DirectSound" pane was on 8 
by default.  I set it to 16 and bam, Kontakt worked!  (I wonder why it would work w/ OSS @ 8 bits but not ALSA...)

I also played with the sample rate.  Sound with Kontakt seems to work with winecfg set to either 22050 (the default) or 44100.  I notice that within 
Kontakt itself, it is set for a sample rate of 44100.  Kontakt works either if winecfg is set to 22050 or 44100.  Is there a reason to prefer one over 
the other?  I don't know much about these things, my guess would be that they should match - the winecfg rate & the Kontakt rate - but Kontakt seems to 
run the same either way.  

I know that Jack and WineASIO are things I should use eventually, but I wanted to troubleshoot as simply as possible and get one thing to work at a 
time.  OK, WineASIO and JACK next...

I see there's also a Jack audio driver under winecfg.  Why isn't that the one to use instead of ALSA if you're running Jack??  Although, I noticed that 
the Jack driver doesn't have any MIDI devices show up - only "wave in" and "wave out" devices.

I'm just getting into this Linux Audio stuff, since you seem to know something about these things, is there a resource(s) for things Linux Audio that 
you can recommend?  


Thanks a bunch,
Cosmo


On Wed Aug 18 21:09 , jordan johnston  sent:

>On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 5:09 PM, Cosmo Lee cosmolee at cosmolee.com> wrote:
>> Ubuntu 10.4, Wine 1.1.42, Native Instruments Kontakt 4, Akai MPK88
>>
>> I've installed Kontakt (sampled musical instruments).  Sound is working OK with the OSS driver, but the program doesn't respond to the USB 
keyboard. :-
>> ( The keyboard shows up in `winecfg` under "Audio", OSS, MIDI In/Out devices.
>
>Why aren't you using ALSA????  you will want to expose Kontakt/wine to
>the alsa driver,
>snd-usb-audio. This driver is plug and play with the AKAI MPK. I own the MPK49.
>OSS is sort of a dying driver, ALSA/Jack is what you will want.
>Also, i am not sure if OSS even would implement midi for our devices....
>
>> I checked the MIDI options for the Kontakt program and it DOES show the Akai keyboard - so the program knows the keyboard exists.  I've got it set so 
that
>> device "Midi 1" is set to "Port A".  I've also tried setting to ports b,c,d, but no luck.
>>
>> I don't have jack or ASIO running yet as I want to troubleshoot one thing at a time.
>
>You will want to get both Jack running, probably jack2 (1.9.5) and the
>Latest WineASIO code
>compiled and installed. Kontakt works great in linux.
>
>> Is there something additional that needs to be done for USB MIDI keyboards to work under Wine?
>
>Nope, just use alsa, and select it in winecfg as your audio driver.
>from there everything
>should work perfect. The usb midi will work  fine, just make sure your
>keyboard is plugged in before you open your wine app, otherwise it may
>not show up. In the end you will want to use jack for audio apps like
>this, just so you know!
>
>I use All of my Native Instruments plugins under Linux.
>
>jordan