midi.autoconnect not working

[Stooovie]

My goal is to have the Pi4 with Fluidsynth/Fluidpatcher permanently turned on and only having to turn on the MIDI keyboard (Nektar LX88+) to start playing.

Currently, if I disconnect/reconnect (or turn off/on) the keyboard, Fluidsynth doesn't start playing unless I manually restart the squishbox service.

midi.autoconnect is already set to "1" in squishboxconf.yaml.

What else can I do? Thanks!

BTW thanks for all your help so far!

[albedozero]

This should work, and does with my keyboards - midi.autoconnect: 1 is all you need. When you say disconnect/reconnect, are you physically unplugging the USB cable, or just disconnecting by turning a switch on the LX88+ on/off? If the latter, then the USB chip in the LX88+ might still be powered by the Pi's USB port, so when you turn the keyboard on it doesn't properly re-announce itself to the Pi.

[Stooovie]

Trying right now and both have the same effect - MIDI coming in according to aseqdump but no audio coming out. I really do need to manually do sudo systemctl restart squishbox.service to get audio working after turning on or plugging in the keyboard.

[albedozero]

This might be a fluidsynth problem with keyboards that present as multiple devices - one for keybed and one for controls; another user had a similar problem using a Keystation MK3 in #71. If you run fluidsynth from the command line with -o midi.autoconnect=1 do you get the same behavior?

[Stooovie]

I get this but still, no audio after turning the keyboard off and back again, despite this saying it's connected succesfully.

pi@rpi:/usr/local/bin $ fluidsynth -o midi.autoconnect=1
FluidSynth runtime version 2.3.2
Copyright (C) 2000-2023 Peter Hanappe and others.
Distributed under the LGPL license.
SoundFont(R) is a registered trademark of Creative Technology Ltd.

fluidsynth: Connection of Midi Through Port-0 succeeded
fluidsynth: Connection of Impact LX88+ MIDI1 succeeded
fluidsynth: Connection of Impact LX88+ MIDI2 succeeded
fluidsynth: warning: Failed to set thread to high priority
Type 'help' for help topics.

> fluidsynth: warning: Failed to set thread to high priority
fluidsynth: Connection of Impact LX88+ MIDI1 succeeded
fluidsynth: Connection of Impact LX88+ MIDI2 succeeded

There is no audio until I call either ./headlesspi.py or sudo systemctl restart squishbox.service

So I'll probably need some script that detects a USB device plugged in and runs either of these commands.

[Stooovie]

For posterity, if someone's in the same situation. I made a nektar_connect.sh script with just

#!/bin/bash
sudo systemctl restart squishbox.service

and a new file in /etc/udev/rules.d called 99-nektar_connect.rules with this content: ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="2467", ATTRS{idProduct}=="2018", RUN+="/home/pi/nektar_connect.sh"

I found the idVendor and idProduct numbers with lsusb.

Now, whenever I turn on the keyboard, it restarts the squishbox service, and everything works as expected.

(BTW ChatGPT wrote it for me. I know it usually invents BS but this time, it worked).

[albedozero]

Glad you found a workaround, and thanks for sharing it here.

If you get a chance to check, I'd still be curious to know if the LX88+ has a problem connection to plain old fluidsynth (without running the squishbox service), but your command

pi@rpi:/usr/local/bin $ fluidsynth -o midi.autoconnect=1

doesn't load a soundfont, so you wouldn't hear any audio no matter what. Unless you load one using fluidsynth shell commands e.g. load sf2/GeneralUser.sf2. You might also need to select a preset using select 0 1 0 0.