Today we made a new product release called rtpmidi for "Debian-13 Universal". What does that mean? This short post will explain.

A service is a program that the operating system automatically starts when it boots. On the Raspberry Pi "buster" operating system, the daemon that starts and stops services is called "systemd." You can read about creating services here:

Along with the recent release of McLaren Labs rtpmidi version 0.5.0, we have new ports to Raspberry Pi 4 Raspbian OS "Buster" and also Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine".

This month McLaren Labs releases rtpmidi version 0.5.0 for Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi. This release brings some great new features, and also provides a few performance and installation improvements.

Network MIDI was invented sometime around 2004 to send MIDI messages over an IP network. To handle network loss, a protocol known as RTP-MIDI was created and documented as RFC-4695. Network MIDI is built into OSX computers and iOS devices. Apple music creators think nothing of connecting MIDI equipment using Ethernet and WiFi, instead of MIDI cables.

The animated screen capture below illustrates the rtpmidi program in action.  The rtpmidi program allows two computers to share musical MIDI events in real time over a network connection.  The RTP-MIDI protocol is a standard implemented on Mac, Windows and Linux computers.  You can use McLaren Labs' implementation of the RTP-MIDI protocol to create musical networks of computers.
What we see is the following.