Pipewire MIDI bridge (ALSA) ports are not grouped by client with latest PW versions.

[Stazed]

The following .png is with raysession 0.18.0 and pipewire 1.0.5 of seq42 with alsa backend. Notice the MIDI ports are grouped in one client.

This next .png is with raysession 0.18.0 with pipewire 1.6.2 and notice the MIDI ports are all individual clients.

I believe this started happening with pipewire version 1.2.0 and later. Looks like something changed in how the port definitions are presented by pipewire for MIDI-bridge.

The un-grouped changes the port names and breaks saved session connections.

I only recently started using PW-jack so not sure exactly when the change in grouping started.

[Houston4444]

Not nice !
The first thing to know would be to be sure that the new port naming is intentional. It is really annoying for saved connections.

The grouping is detected with the port name, for example with a port named:

Midi-Bridge:seq42:[1] seq42 1

The patchbay will know with the second colon (':') that ports belongs to group seq42. The true port name can be longer in reality, to see it, right click on port -> get infos.

It seems that now the second colon is missing in the name, and maybe something else also changes, you should compare full names to see that.

Are you sure that the same pipewire config files are in use in both cases ?

Are bridges for physical ports affected ?

[Stazed]

The second colon seems to be missing. I use stock pipewire from the repos and I have made no config modifications. The .png are on the same computer with dual boot ubuntu uses pw 1.0.5 and manjaro uses pw 1.6.2. I also checked with vm for fedora which uses pw 1.4.11 and does not group.

The full name with ubuntu pw 1.0.5 :

The full name with manjaro pw 1.6.2 :

I don't have any physical midi devices with multiple midi ports, so I cannot tell if physical port are affected.

[Houston4444]

I remember that an option exists in pipewire conf to change the way ports are named, unfortunately, I don't find it now. Maybe, as for a2j, it is related to unique ports.

I don't have any physical midi devices with multiple midi ports, so I cannot tell if physical port are affected.

Yes, but, can you see the second colon in their name?

[Stazed]

The midi bridge with my UM-1 and midi through:

[Houston4444]

Ok ! Really not nice, with this, we have no separator to found the client name, so no possibility to group them. IMO, It is a PipeWire regression.

[Stazed]

Looking at qpwgraph, it does group with both PW 1.0.5 and 1.6.2 but with different port names... So agreed, looks like a pipewire regression.

PW qpwgraph 1.0.5 :

PW qpwgraph 1.6.2 :

I will see if I can file a bug with pipewire.

[Houston4444]

I will see if I can file a bug with pipewire.

That is exactly what I was doing, so you can add comments here if you want : https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/work_items?show=eyJpaWQiOiI1MjI5IiwiZnVsbF9wYXRoIjoicGlwZXdpcmUvcGlwZXdpcmUiLCJpZCI6MTQ5NjQ4fQ%3D%3D

[Houston4444]

Fixed in PipeWire with https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/commit/03fd89abeab5540251bede5015d0d85d76eaa71b !

Of course, with theses versions of PipeWire it will remain broken, I can't adapt. I'll still have to review graceful names in the canvas (suppress (capture) or (playback)), and if possible to adapt saved connections (I am really not sure it is doable).

[Stazed]

if possible to adapt saved connections (I am really not sure it is doable).

Based on the fact that no one else complained about this since August 2024, I may be the only one who noticed. The projects I have that still use ALSA midi are older and I am going to migrate them to using the new jack midi backend. So for me, it is not a big issue to adapt the saved connections. I can manually fix any port name changes myself as there are only a few projects that I have this issue.

Thanks for looking into this and getting it resolved!

[Houston4444]

no one else complained about this since August 2024

I am not so sure about the date, the change has been done at this date in the repo, but maybe the first stable release containing this change is 1.6.0 (2026-02-19). However, I don't think I will work on manage connections changes, or in a very simple way: write a little shell script to rename ports the ports in ray-jackpatch files.

Thanks for looking into this and getting it resolved!

You're welcome, nice to see that the PipeWire dev understood the problem and fixed it so quickly..