Getting Midi over Bluetooth (MoB) to work together with Bitwig under Ubuntu 22.04 requires you to jump through a few hoops. Two main issues need to be navigated around:
- The ubuntu userspace bluetooth driver does not have midi enabled
- Bitwig only accepts hardware Midi devices, while MoB creates a software midi device
Fixing the first requires us to build bluez from scratch and enable the midi functionality as a compiler flag: https://tttapa.github.io/Pages/Ubuntu/Software-Installation/BlueZ.html
The second issue is resolved using virtual midi devices and the a2jmidid
-bridge:
https://github.com/anton-k/linux-audio-howto/blob/master/doc/os-setup/virtual-midi.md
I was able to use carla to directly connect the virtual midi device and the BLE midi device without needing
a2jmidid
! not sure how universally that will work but figure I should mention that in case it's useful to anyone