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why does midi not fucking work properly on my macbook. it is enraging. is the 2017 macbook just incapable of sending midi events correctly to a usb adapter due to some hardware issue or does macos just have some incredible bug that only happens for me somehow. i don't get it

a hardware issue is not implausible. could this machine only having a single usb-c port somehow be the problem? does its hardware usb controller just have terrible latency characteristics or something? i wish i fucking knew. it's just suffering

‪yes, i have tried:‬

‪* different midi adaptors from different vendors‬
‪* different midi synthesisers‬
‪* different midi players‬
‪* cutting out every usb hub on the path‬
‪* not using display out simultaneously‬
‪* reducing cpu load by closing all other apps‬

‪the symptoms are that every instrument sounds like piano, so it seems like program change messages are vanishing into thin air. my suspicion is a timing issue where a gm or xg reset is sent too late relative to the following messages. but it happens so infuriatingly consistently‬

‪so i wonder if it's some latency problem where it just can't fucking maintain a simple fucking 50ms gap between messages, but seemingly only at the start of a song, because the timing sounds fine the rest of the time? or maybe messages actually are vanishing. i don't know!

‪oh no, the qy data filer (an app by yamaha that communicates with the yamaha qy70 sequencer via sysex) running under wine sometimes shows obvious data corruption when it reads back data, if it manages at all. so maybe it's not just timing, maybe there's a deeper problem.‬

goddamn, wouldn't you fucking know it, when i boot up ubuntu in a virtualbox vm and use usb passthrough, midi plays back flawlessly! i'm… amazed, to be honest? very happy, but amazed. i guess that rules out a hardware issue, maybe apple's midi driver just sucks (which is weird!)

(the song is https://mododtm.bandcamp.com/track/the-back-nine)

‪wow, the modern ubuntu installer doesn't give any progress indication while installing. it doesn't even say something like “Installing, please wait…”, so you'd be forgiven for thinking it's stuck on the “Welcome to Ubuntu” screens for no reason‬

‪ok fun fact: if you choose the minimal configuration when installing ubuntu server, it will have broken network connectivity and all the tools you'd use to diagnose and fix this are missing! did nobody test this????‬

‪(i guess it's meant to be configured via some external cloud service thing… my fault for not realising this probably)‬

when installing ubuntu in a vm i wanted to keep it under 10GB because my laptop is resource starved. that's too small for the ubuntu desktop installer, so instead i installed ubuntu server and then did sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop-minimal :3

i was even able to disable swap space to free up 2GB of disk space, and bring down the vm's allocated ram to just 1GiB. i don't need more, i'm just using it to play midi files and maybe run a midi editor in wine :3

@hikari anything is possible at Ubuntu

@flacs the only limit is yourself

@hikari the line that resonates with everyone ;w;