Whats the difference between the MIDI implementation in the Sun JDK 1.5.0 for Linux and Tritonus MIDI implementation?
Both implementations use ALSA for MIDI I/O. However, while the JDK uses ALSA’s “rawmidi”, a low-level interface, is Tritonus based on ALSA’s sequencer, a high-level interface. The drawback of using rawmidi is that devices are opened exclusively. So native applications using the rawmidi interface and the JDK can block each other. On the other hand, the high-level interface as used by Tritonus allows shared access to the device. This enables multiple applications to run concurrently. Tritonus can also use ALSA’s sequencer queues to implement Sequencer. The JDK has a pure java Sequencer implementation, similar to the “Tritonus Java Sequencer” (see Q: 10).
