[linux-audio-user] Linux synths

Atte André Jensen atte at ballbreaker.dk
Mon Sep 15 12:03:01 EDT 2003


On Mon, 15 Sep 2003 07:44:23 -0700 (GMT-07:00)
Ken Locarnini <renueden at earthlink.net> wrote:

> I'm happy to be back after about 2 years away from Linux.  The
> audio/music world seems to be taking off and thats great.

Indeed!

>  I'd like some general comments on what would be peoples favorite
>  reactor type synth in Linux as of now.  I'm primarily interested in
>  realtime, multi timbral midi controlled synths.

I simply love csound. It's flexible, powerful, stable and well
documented. I know that some (most?) people find the fact that it's text
based a minus, but I don't agree. After working with pd intensely for a
couple of weeks I realized that I work much faster in csound.

I'm running csound under debian/unstable on kernel 2.6.0-test5 with a
csound buffersize of 128 on a PIV 2400 laptop, using Evolution USB
keyboards as controllers. I have more polyphony in real time than I can
use with two hands for "normal" (subtractive, fm, sample playback,
soundfont playback, additive) patches. This is even with a few global FX
units (chorus, delay and rotary speaker) running all the time.

The only not-so-nice thing about csound is that I didn't manage (or try
that hard, actually) to make it run alongside other sound-producing
applications, including jack, pd or fluidsynth.  Could be a problem if
you want to use LADSPA plugins or do hd-recording...

>  How about sequencers?

I didn't work much with sequencers under linux, but FWIW I've settled on
Muse. Needless to say it's quite simple to route midi events from Muse
to csound.

-- 
peace, love & harmony
Atte



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