[linux-audio-user] More MIDI/sysex dump/sequencers...

[Dave Phillips]

Aaron Trumm wrote:

>I hadn't thought of it as bloated per se *laugh*  it's a simple feature
>that's a part of cakewalk for DOS, for god's sake - they all seem to do
>realtime sysex recording/playback - seems a lot easier to do normal dumping
>to me, since that was happening before realtime sysex stuff (or WAS it?)
>but it used to be that they hadn't integrated sysex stuff into sequencers,
>so you'd get these little midi librarian programs.  well ok then cakewalk
>and others integrated the little midi librarian into the sequencer.  hence,
>my thought...
>  
>
Hi Aaron, hi Tim:

  IIRC Cakewalk was one of the first sequencers to let you try adding 
sysex messages to the sequence stream. At that time that meant adding 
only very short messages, because the hardware was so slow. A sysex 
message of any length would audibly disturb the sequence timing. But I 
thought that feature was pretty advanced, it would let the user make 
neat little adjustments to his synths that were beyond the reach of MIDI 
controllers. Alas, I never really got into Cakewalk, I was (and still 
am) too happy with Voyetra's Sequencer Plus. The Voyetra programmers 
wouldn't add the feature precisely because of the timing issue.

  With CPU speeds being what they are today I'd expect in-stream sysex 
would be a given for Rosegarden and MusE. Werner ? Chris ? Richard ?

  Sequencer Plus Gold included a nifty patch librarian that supported 
quite a variety of machines. I'd love to see something like that in RG 
or MusE too. Maybe in the future ?

>  there's a libarian of sorts called glib - haven't managed to
>get it compiled either (a weird problem I may be on here asking about ;) -
>on and on! :)
>  
>
Skip glib. The pyramids of Giza are younger...

[re: JSynthLib]

JS will work for you if it supports your synths. I worked with Torsten 
on the TX802 stuff, frankly I think he did a terrific job. In Linux MIDI 
software JS is the closest thing to my old Bacchus and Sideman editors, 
or to the graphic editors for the Mac and other 68k machines. But JS 
could certainly use some more developers... :(

Cranky me would love to see a MIDI-only sequencer for Linux, i.e., with 
absolutely no audio support. But I'm not too distressed: I can run 
Sequencer Plus in DOSemu just fine, and I've recently been playing with 
Master Tracks Pro in Xsteem (an Atari ST emulator), with pretty good 
results too...

Btw, out of all the links on the MIDI page of the Linux soundapps site 
here's the Linux MIDI software I actually use :

  MusE
  KeyKit
  JSynthLib

I've recently installed PlanetCCRMA's RH9 and will soon get into 
Rosegarden too. There are some other interesting links I want to check 
out, I just have to figure how to do  without sleep and food...

== dp (who just returned from a combined classical/blues gig)