The problem I was having was that I could record MIDI, but not send it to hardware output. For impatient, just run chmod o+rw /dev/umidi*. Yes, it was that stupid and it took me few days to realize what’s the problem, so let’s go through my setup and debug process. It will be fun, I promice.

I never used hardware MIDI before, although I used software MIDI for various things for years, so I have a rough feeling how things should work. Anyway, I have a footswitch (Behringer FCB1010) MIDI out into USB audio interface (Presonus AudioBox 1818VLS) in. Then jack_umidi -d /dev/umidi0.0 exposes hardware MIDI ports as jack MIDI ports. You can use jack_lsp to display all jack ports and jack_connect <out> <in> to connect whatever is coming from input to output and make your audio interface act as MIDI thru. That way I use Presonus as a “proxy” between FCB1010 and my guitar processor (Line 6 POD X3 Pro) in order to be able to record controls at the same time as I record dry guitar. I noticed that if I remove Presonus as proxy, controls work, but with it I couldn’t get it to work. I tested to make sure jack is emitting MIDI messages all, and it did. I tested hardware using my wife’s laptop and Linux, and that worked. At that point I realized it can be too many things, as I have too much apps in my setup, so I decided to make it as simple as possible: write a MIDI program in C based on synth example. To be precise, I wanted to use the open_midi_device and then whatever I read from it, I write to it back. The dumbest MIDI thru ever! Given example uses MIDI device in read only mode, but I needed read/write. Once I tried to alter it, I got Permission denied. Looking at /dev/umidi0.0 permissions, no wonder, because it’s owner is root, group is operator and it’s mod is 644. To make this right, add this rules to /etc/devfs.rules (create if it doesn’t exist):

[localrules=5]
add path 'umidi*' mode 0666

To make those rules active, add devfs_system_ruleset="localrules" to /etc/rc.conf. On next reboot everything will be just fine.

Have fun with the MIDI!