MIDI server not set up by default in Ubuntu Studio - why?

[Toby Smithe]

On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 19:29 +0200, Grzegorz Galezowski wrote:
> So my question is - are there any reasons why timidity server can't work 
> out-of-the-box in future Ubuntu Studio releases? It seems kinda weird 
> that I can't use default-installed apps after just installing the system 
> (I have Ubuntu Studio installed on two computers so it's not a "there 
> must be something wrong with your sound card" issue).

Well, it's non-trivial to detect whether the sound card currently in use
has working MIDI support, and then configure timidity correctly. Then,
there is the issue that timidity uses a large amount of CPU time to
process the sounds. Finally, one might use a USB MIDI device, which may
not have been detected or installed at install time, so
auto-configuration would be wasting power on timidity.

Would you want a daemon to run or HAL to keep an eye out for new MIDI
devices and enable/disable timidity accordingly? Whilst this is
possible, it is a large amount of work to accomplish what may seem at
first trivial.