The last couple of days have been mostly used in Perl coding on customer jobs but I managed to get some free time last night to play with ALSA some more. I had previously gotten all the internal functionality of ALSA + Sound Blaster Live! working great so currently I’m trying to get the external MIDI port working. After a few hours of tweaking the configuration and searching newsgroups and mailing lists for the obscure, undocumented secrets of how to install ALSA properly, I finally got MIDI out working reliably. MIDI in is another story. The first attempt to use the MIDI in port causes the requesting program to segfault. Any further attempts to use the port result in dead processes that cannot be killed except by a reboot. The ALSA driver itself seems to die as well and cannot be stopped or restarted without a reboot. It’s likely a bug in either the SB Live! driver or ALSA. I’ve noticed with interal or external MIDI port usage that the ALSA drivers will occasionally die for no apparent reason but they can usually be fixed just by stopping and restarting ALSA.