[linux-audio-user] soft synth manager gui

[Paul Winkler]

In fact there has been quite a lot of talk about this
kind of thing over on linux-audio-dev. Somebody came
up with a working prototype recently, but I forget who.
Check the archives for "Session manager" or something
similar.

--PW


On Fri, Dec 20, 2002 at 04:08:50PM +0000, Chris Cannam wrote:
> A number of people using the Rosegarden sequencer for MIDI (myself
> included) are principally using it to drive ALSA soft synths such
> as iiwusynth or timidity.  Unlike (say) MusE, which allows you to
> start and stop soft synths from the sequencer itself, Rosegarden
> treats soft synths just like any other MIDI device: it knows
> nothing special about them except the name that ALSA returns.
> It's the user's responsibility to start and stop synths and ensure
> that the right patches and so forth are available.
> 
> This makes for quite a bit of flexibility, but means that the
> average user who runs a small number of synths but changes the
> patch sets (soundfonts or whatever) frequently has a little bit
> of a management problem in ensuring that the correct setup for a
> given composition is always available.
> 
> What I imagine would be useful is a generic probably-GUI-driven app
> that simply starts and stops soft synths, particularly synths that
> are driven using the ALSA MIDI API, that output to JACK, and that
> might not have GUIs of their own (admittedly the only one of those
> I can think of right now is iiwusynth, but I'm sure there are others
> and even if you only use iiwusynth you could have any number of
> different soundfont configurations).  As well as starting and
> stopping synths on command, it might be able to store and recall a
> selection of multi-synth studio setups of the user's design.  It'd
> be particularly neat if the soft-synth manager could itself be
> driven remotely through some sort of MIDI control event.
> 
> Is there such a thing as this?  (Anyone feel like writing one?)  Is
> there any other way of arranging synths and suchlike so that this
> sort of application is not actually necessary, assuming that we want
> to maintain the current arrangement where Rosegarden does not take
> responsibility for running the synths itself?
> 
> 
> Chris

-- 

Paul Winkler
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