> > rosegarden and muse's source it seems there's always app specifics > > intertwined. > > Sure, *because* there wasn't a standard midifile library around in the > first place, they all hacked it into the program directly, therefore it is > intertwined :-).
No. The first release date of Thompson's library is unknown, but at some places in the sources there is a notice saying: "June, 1989 - Added code to write midi files...". The old Xaw-based Rosegarden was born in 1994. The new Rosegarden4 development started in 2001, and Muse did in 1999. Why nobody uses this library is unknown for me. There is a copy of it in alsa-lib package [1], added in 1999 according with the CVS history. It is used for tests, but the MIDI player and recorder programs in alsa-utils don't use it. [1] http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/alsa/alsa-lib/test/midifile.c?rev=1.3&view=markup Regards, Pedro