Flapi not working on MacOS

[bjornpijnacker]

I installed flapi using pip, as per the instructions. I cannot seem to get the example working.

After installation, no midi devices are visible in FL. After running $ flapi in the command-line, this is what I see:

After 60 seconds, the CLI tool times out with the message:

Flapi could not connect to FL Studio.
Please verify that FL Studio is running and the server is installed

The midi device then disappears.

I also tried making my own midi busses on the IAC driver with the names "Flapi Request" and "Flapi Response" to no avail.

[MaddyGuthridge]

Sorry, I'm not really sure what's up with this. The script should create its own virtual MIDI ports for both "Flapi request" and "Flapi response". I'm really not sure why it's only creating one. Perhaps if I have time in the future, I'll try to look into it myself, but I'm super busy with other projects, so I can't promise anything.

Perhaps you can get a little more info by running flapi -vvv to get additional logging information. That could be a good starting point for figuring this out.

[MaddyGuthridge]

Hey @bjornpijnacker ! Sadly I no-longer have the time or energy to maintain Flapi, and so it is unlikely I'll be able to find and fix this issue.

You can read more about this here. If someone creates a well-maintained fork, I will happily update the readme of this repo to point users to it!

[bjornpijnacker]

Updating to say that I don't have a Mac computer available anymore to test on. So will not be updating this myself. Someone else can pick this up, perhaps? I'll leave the issue open

[tylerjharden]

I have picked this up, completed the TODOs, and fixed this. Working end-to-end on mac OS. Pull Request open. Happy to takeover maintenance of this project.

[gavin2059]

I tried tyler's fork and was unable to get it working. Maybe I messed something up on my end?

I think to fix the ports we can change roughly 10 lines of code described below.
Here is my PR: #49

2-step fix here, although you only need 1 to get it working:

Fix 1: open_ioport for Auto Port Creation

Fix flapi creating ports itself on mac. We need to use the mido function open_ioport instead of open_input and open_output.

From here, the README instructions should work.

Fix 2: IAC Driver Port Name Matching for Manual Port Creation

For Audio MIDI Setup ports to work, we need to edit the open_port function slightly. The current code assumes that the drivers will be named exactly "Flapi XXX" with a number suffix. However, the mac driver created ports are always detected as "IAC Driver Flapi XXX". So this code will never find IAC Driver ports.

After doing this, I was able to connect to IAC ports, or have FLAPI create its own ports, and produce a healthy heartbeat.

Then I Got Stuck on SyntaxError on enable() Import

However I'm now stuck on this error:

When we do enable()'s fl_exec to import the required modules, FL will throw an invalid syntax error, which will show in the REPL as this:

assert_response_is_ok
    raise decode_python_object(msg[2:])
  File "<string>", line 1
    import playlist, channels, mixer, patterns, arrangement, ui, transport, plugins, general
    ^^^^^^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Here's what it looks like with the 2 ports (if you swallow the above error you can into the REPL but you'll encounter more issues)

Note: Branched off e8afd59 Instead of Latest Commit

This is somewhat unrelated, but when I worked on this, I also branched off commit
e8afd59 instead of the last commit because I encountered several hiccups with the last commit:

1. The needed files would not be copied to FL scripts folder via install command because they're not in the server folder anymore
2. __file__ is not available in context of FL Studio, so device_flapi_receive.py would crash
3. After fixing the above, I wasn't able to get the device_flapi_xxx.py scripts working because the flapi module imports would chain into importing mido and crash FL

I wasn't able to get past this 3rd issue, so I went back to an older commit to see if I could get something working first on the ports side.

Not sure if other people can get it working on the latest commit.