Akai MPK Mini not listed in Midi IO

Support, Help & Resources
1

Hi there! I’m new to Sonic Pi and mostly everithing here, so please forgive me if I did some stupid mistakes. I’m trying to connect my Akai mpk mini to Sonic Pi, but it is not listed in the IO menu. I’ve checked the ‘lsusb’ and it is listed, also de ‘aplaymidi - l’ and it is also listed. Any idea of hoe to solve it?

I’m using a Raspberry pi 3 with Noobs installed, I don’t know if I have to install any package or something to use a MIDI controller.

Thank you in advance!!!

2

Hello,

version of sonic pi wanted :slight_smile:

You can install helm and see if your mpk is listed. https://tytel.org/helm/downloads/

3

Thanks for replying. I’m running Sonic Pi v. 3.1.0 on Noobs 3.2.1 in a Raspberry Pi 3.

I tried to install Helm, but I think it’s not possible in Raspbian.

4

Hi @Pepo41,

can you somehow confirm, that in your installation midi (and osc) is working at all? Here are some hints that might help:

  • Do you have another midi controller that works, i. e. from which you can see input in SP?
  • Can you see anything in the osmid_m2o.log (see the folder `~/.sonic-pi/log/)
  • Just to make sure: By the way, you have the midi subsystem activated in the i/o settings, right?
5

raspian version ?
Debian 9 “Stretch” ?
Run into a terminal
cat /etc/issue/

Spi on raspberrypi is not “un long fleuve tranquille” , it’s a bit tough cause parameters comes from so many pieces of software and hardware considerations.

6

If you are using the recently released Sonic Pi 3.1 on Rasbian Buster then this is NOT really a fully fledged version 3.1 In particular it does NOT support midi or OSC messages, even though the help file suggests that it does!

Sam Aaron has had nothing at all to do with this release on Raspbian, and was not consulted about it. We are not even sure who has done it. It doesn’t include the necessary support (osmid m20 and 02m files and erlang support) for midi to work.

I have suggested on the Raspberry Pi forums that this should NOT be called Sonic Pi 3.1 precisely to avoid the problems that you are finding, but should be renamed something else.

If you are indeed using the latest noobs install then the only solution at present is to build your own version. I have given details of how to do this here.

At present Sam Aaron does not have the resources to build and release a version for Raspbiam Buster, which involves quite a bit of work in producing a suitable .deb package. Building your own obviates the need for such a package.

ADDENDUM
There is another solution on a Pi3 (not a Pi4). Use an earlier Stretch distribution of Raspbian. On this you can use version 3.0.1 which will support midi.
See http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/images/raspbian-2019-04-09/ for a suitable Rasbian Stretch distribution.

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