MIDI on Android: Java and/or AIR libraries

Question

I've been contemplating (re)building an app on iPad for some time, where I would use objective-C and DSMI to send MIDI signals to a host computer. This is not bad (I mean, except for actually writing the app).

Now I'm contemplating perhaps developing the app for Android tablets (TBA).

In Java, what options are available for MIDI message communication? I'm quite familiar with javax.sound.midi, but then I would need a virtual MIDI port to send messages to the host.

On the other hand, if the app were done in Adobe AIR, what options would I have available for communicating with MIDI?

Obviously another option is to send/receive messages over a TCP/IP socket to a Java host, and talk that way, but it sounds a tad cumbersome... or perhaps not? DSMI does use a host program, after all.

Answer 1

javax.sound.midi is not available in android.

The only access to midi functionality in android is through the JetPlayer class and its very much designed for use in games. Android will play a midi file but its unclear what code path it uses, theres no way to write to the midi hardware from memory.

In one app I've made i needed to play notes dynamically based on the GUI/user interaction and ended up having to use samples and pitch filters to create the notes.

Sounds to me like what you need to do is port DSMI to android, its open source the iPhone library looks pretty simple, shouldn't be difficult to port over.

EDIT:

After thinking about this for second you wouldn't gain anything by using javax.sound.midi or whatever midi functionality exists in AIR anyway. All you need to do is pass MIDI messages through a network link to another device who is responsible for communication with the actual MIDI synth device. This is exactly what DSMI does. Porting the iPhone libdsmi to Android is what you need to do, its only 2 source files and 2 headers. 1 handles the MIDI message format which is very simple and can pretty much just be converted line by line to java and the other handles the network connection to the DSMI server which will need to be rewritten to use Android semantics for creating network connections.