A while back, I was doing some work with Arduino, passing serial data to the mac to a small application written with Processing which converted the serial data into MIDI data and pushed it out into other apps. Now Processing is a Java thing; and the standalone applications it creates are Java applications.

All fine, but a mere few days before an assessment, I couldn’t get the Serial to Midi application to work; I recalled an article on createdigitalmotion.com which I admit, I didn’t read fully, which said the following:

On the music side, Apple dumped its com.apple.audio.midi java package with 10.4.8. Result: not only do you lose all the features that make the Mac great for MIDI, like the IAC bus for inter-application MIDI routing, but your external devices also spontaneously disappear. Nice.

Now at this point, I put 2 + 2 together and got 5 … Apple have broken my app… Ahh what to do - revert my entire computer to 10.4.7?

So, I sat down and over the next few days and with much help, I managed to build (read: hack together) a serial to midi converter in Objective-C and Cocoa. Works perfectly (now!).

So, no more problem. Indeed. And not 1 day later, I remembered that I had bought an Java extension from Mandolane, which was needed for my original app. I reinstalled that and bingo, that worked too. Doh. Doh. Doh.

Oh well; I wanted to start learning Cocoa etc!

SteamSHIFT out.

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