couldn't find package 'jack'

[gorjious]

Hello,

I am trying to install mididings but am running into this issue: "couldn't find package 'jack'"

I am new at using terminal but here is what I have installed:
-Mac OS High Sierra
-Python 2.7.10
-Python 3.6.5
-pip 10.0.1 from /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/pip (python 2.7)
-jackOSX Version 0.92_b3
-jackdmp 1.9.11

A run through what I have tried:
-downloaded the ZIP from mididings github
-installed Jack 2 for OS X going through the installation menu
-in the terminal I cd to the mididings folder and trying to install I get the following:

mididings-master$ ./setup.py build [--disable-jack-midi] [--disable-alsa-seq]
couldn't find package 'jack'
mididings-master$ ./setup.py install
couldn't find package 'jack'
mididings-master$

Any idea what I am doing wrong?

[stefets]

Hummmm... I had the same problem for ALSA and I think I was missing the libasound ... I think you are missing the development library for jack... Maybe you can install the libjack-dev or libjack-jackd2-dev ?

Try libjack-dev first.

Let me know if it works.

[lcoenen]

@stefets I have the same issue with ALSA (I'm trying to apply a fix to make it work with my midi controller, a AKAI midimix). I'm on debian 9, I installed the libasound and libasound-dev. I just cannot seems to find the right file for pkg-config. Any insight?

[lcoenen]

Update: I tried to look in the debian repository after a alsa.pc file using apt-file, but nothing popped up :(

EDIT: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=181589 I find that, mind be a hint.
EDIT2: it looks like the file have been deleted from the repo altogether. I manually added this file to /usr/lib/pkgconfig/alsa.pc:

[stefets]

You have a Mac? Not sure it works. There is a post in the mididing Google group about Mac. https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/mididings
Maybe a solution here?

[rmattes]

@lcoenen : the pkg-config info for libalsa in Debian is provided by the libasound2-dev package (and the place to look for those files on most systems is /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig)

[chrisbc]

I have built and tested mididings on macOS Mojave 10.14.5 and found this article helpful.

FWIW I did the following

• built and installed jack2 locally (https://github.com/jackaudio/jack2.git)
• installed (via brew) these libraries (some are possibly redundant)...

   aften pkg-config glib boost-python boost-build boost-bcp boost-mpi

• set up linker path variables (ref https://stackoverflow.com/a/31457360) :

   export LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/include:/usr/local/lib
   export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib

• modified mididings/setup.py to fix boost library names

diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index 6376278..ba73565 100755
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -148,7 +148,7 @@ sources = [
 
 include_dirs.append('src')
 
-boost_python_suffixes = ['-py%d%d' % sys.version_info[:2]]
+boost_python_suffixes = ['%d%d' % sys.version_info[:2]]
 if sys.version_info[0] == 3:
     boost_python_suffixes.append('3')
 libraries.append(boost_lib_name('boost_python', boost_python_suffixes))

• built/installed mididings (which until now failed with various build errors)
• installed python decorator
• start jackd with the -X coremidi option
• run mididings with -J or -R option

NB I found jack_lsp -A useful as it shows the jack port names and their respective coremidi names which are more useful. e.g.

MacMuso22:mididings chrisbc$ jack_lsp -A
system:capture_1
   coreaudio::out_1
...
system_midi:capture_1
   coremidi:IAC.bus1:out1
...
system_midi:capture_3
   coremidi:virtual1:out3
etc

mididings seems only to recognise the jack names & not the aliases.
eg

mididings -J -I "system_midi:capture_3" -p