Well this is a bit off topic. Nothing to do with JUCE but I know this community has a lot of talented audio developpers, so I thought I'd ask. Jules : please delete my message if it's not appropriate to post off topic content like this. Here goes :
We are currently outsourcing the development of a virtual midi and audio driver.
Basically, it's like Virtual Audio Cable and loopbe1, put together.
I must confess that I'm not experienced at all in the drivers world.
The freelancer suggested using portctl to develop the MIDI part of the driver. While this sounds like a good idea, it seems to rely a lot on direct X.
The final product will be used in conjunction with DAW which will work probably in ASIO mode.
My question is very simple : is this gonna work (The ASIO with portctl part) ? Is it the best way to develop a midi driver ? Any advice will be welcome.
Using this you don't have to worry anymore about creating VMIDI drivers, which is something very tricky if you want to get it working on 32 and 64 bit computers, to distribute (must be signed nowadays), to maintain... All of this is done for you by CopperLan.
It's very simple to add a MIDI<->CopperLan bridge in your application, then you can patch it (in a channel basis) to any physical or virtual MIDI port on the network (can be locally on the computer, or on any other computer - Mac or PC -located on the same network). So your code can control/be controlled by a DAW, somewhere, not necessary on the same computer.
CopperLan can be used for free if your product is not intended to be sold, if it's a DIY, or during evaluation process and development phase. There is nothing to pay while you don't make money with it.
I can help if you want more information, if you need help to use it, sample code, etc.
Until now we didn't make difference between hardware and software products, so it was the standard licence: 2€ per unit sold. But we had a lot of very interesting discussions with small and big software companies last week during the NAMM. It appears that this is not suited to the market for a number of reasons. So we're just changing the licence model for software products. It remains free for freewares (of course), and a single fee will be charged per commercial product. A market study is ongoing to determine the best value. Feel free to contact David (dhe@klavis.com) if you want more information or if you want to give your opinion ;-)
