I'm planning out a summer coding project for myself. I work with a lot of MIDI and have been researching it a lot. I know it's an old technology, but it works with a lot of music hardware/software so in my eyes, it's still viable. Anyway, I haven't ever worked with writing drivers or anything, so I don't know where I would start with this.

So, provided I have MIDI data already being sent over LAN to a server (I know how to do that part), what steps would it take for the server to channel those received messages to an emulated MIDI device, that could then be accessed in music software and so on? Also, what would it take to also send MIDI data back through the LAN to be received by the device that originally received the message?

I'm not really looking for too specific a solution. Really I am just trying to come up with a game plan right now and I need to figure out where/what to research.