[linux-audio-user] Advice for new users?

Chris Cannam cannam at all-day-breakfast.com
Thu Oct 10 17:56:00 EDT 2002


matthew yee-king writes:
>
> and what of rosegarden? can't that use softsynths via an alsa virtual
> midi driver? 
>
> http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/rosegarden 

Yes, although as someone else points out, so can any sequencer that
uses ALSA to drive its MIDI devices.  I use only softsynths on this
machine (a laptop with no hardware MIDI support) and they work
very well.

Rosegarden-4 is probably the nearest thing you'll find to Cubase on
Linux now.  I say that with some confidence even though it's not at all
close to Cubase in professionalism or scope, just because there are so
few other music applications on Linux that are designed to be quite so
general-purpose and immediately effective.  It's not entirely stable or
feature-complete yet and we take a somewhat good-enough attitude
to latency and performance issues in a way that's entirely suitable for
a home musician but not for studio-quality use.  But it's entirely
possible already to make real music with it, and we'd love more
constructive feedback from people who are trying to do that.

Rosegarden-4 does quality MIDI sequencing and editing, multi-track
audio via JACK with LADSPA plugins (this stuff is fairly new in RG, could
use some knowledgeable testers), and good score editing.  We've
been demoing it at the London Linux Expo yesterday and today and
despite the odd crash we've had (I think) pretty productive results.
And of course made a lot of noise, most of it rather unattractive.
Hey ho.


Chris




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