Issue was solved. Turns out all this time i was connecting my controller's input port to PD instead of it's output port. Thanks for the help

@oid Something odd: when i run aconnect -i or aconnect -o it lists PD's ports backwards ("Pure Data Midi-Out 1" as input, "Pure Data Midi-In" as output). Is it supposed to be like this?

Nope. When I enter MIDI Settings there is only this:

I recently built pdnext from source on my Linux system (Mint Debian Edition), and i've had a few problems.
First it wouldn't connect to my MIDI controller (Novation Launchkey Mini MK3), due to it being mislabeled as an audio device.
This was solved by running aconnect and connecting the ports via the terminal. However, pd still won't receive any midi messages from my controller. I ran

amidi -d -p hw:1

on the terminal (hw:1 being my controllers MIDI Port) to make sure data was being received by my computer, and had no problem. So it has to be something happening in pd where the information gets lost.
Would really appreciate some help with this.

i tried this but it outputs "tried but couldn't sync A/D/A"