[Media_api] PortMidi reports success on init but ALSA ouputs error message

[Sebastien Frippiat]

Hello.

I am currently searching for a cross-platform library for MIDI I/O. 
After searching a bit on the internet, I found these two libraries : 
PortMidi and midiio (http://midiio.sapp.org/). The problem is that both 
of them don't seem to be updated frequently and support seems to lack.

midiio doesn't give any documentation (links to improv are given but 
currently don't work). Furthermore, I didn't manage to compile it using 
MSYS (they said Visual C++ is supported but there isn't any 
project/makefile for Windows), nor did I under Linux (RedHat with 
3.4.4). They say that it compiles using GCC 3.3 but don't say anything 
more. Support seems to lack A LOT.

So, I tried PortMidi. I managed to compile it using MSYS thanks to a 
user-contributed makefile (though it shouldn't be too hard to write it 
by myself). Then, I tried to compile it under Linux and, again, no problem.

Bit now, I have a problem as I started to use it. It fails when I call 
Pm_Initialize but it returns pmNoError. In fact, I have the following 
message displayed in my console : ALSA lib 
seq_hw.c:446:(snd_seq_hw_open) open /dev/snd/seq failed: No such file or 
directory. I tried the sample/test programs and they behave similarly. I 
know there is a problem with my computer (in fact I don't have any MIDI 
ports :-) ) but it scares me a bit that PortMidi fails to return an 
error on initialization. I don't want to have a program that think it is 
running successfully but fails on every MIDI operation.

Any ideas / suggestions ?

Thanks,
Sebastien Frippiat