Bitwig Studio and busy MIDI controllers on Linux

There have been a few attempts to be able to use MIDI device controllers in Bitwig Studio running on Linux. For me none of them worked one by one. Instead it seems that I needed a combination of a couple of the methods. I used Cadence to do a couple of configurations for Jack:

The ALSA MIDI Bridge should be stopped, and not start with Jack. And the MIDI Driver should be set to None. Then make sure that the ALSA to Jack MIDI daemon is not running. In a command-line terminal:

ps aux | ps aux | grep -i a2jmidid

It should report only something similar to:

arrow 259683 0.0 0.0 12364 2824 pts/0 S+ 18:51 0:00 grep --color=auto -i a2jmidid

If it shows

arrow 259051 0.0 0.0 11760 5144 ? S 18:49 0:00 /usr/bin/a2jmidid dbus

Then you need to kill it:

kill 259051

(Or the PID you get). It might be possible to run

a2j_control --exit

But I haven’t tried that. After all of this, start (or restart) Bitwig. Now you should hopefully be able to connect directly to the MIDI device controllers.