[LAU] Question about fitting all this MIDI music stuff together

[david]

I have a laptop with the Intel integrated audio, which lacks any form of 
hardware MIDI synthesizer, so I use fluidsynth. I use Rosegarden for my 
sequencer. I just got an E-Mu 1x1 USB<>MIDI cable to hook in my Yamaha 
keyboard.

Let me see if I've got this whole thing straight. Keyboard talks to 
Rosegarden. Rosegarden talks to fluidsynth (and to the keyboard, if I 
want). Fluidsynth talks to JACK, JACK talks to ALSA, ALSA drives the 
sound hardware. So I play something on the keyboard, it bounces through 
the above chain (with of course the manual step of playing the 
composition from Rosegarden if I'm using Rosegarden), and sound burbles 
joyously from the laptop sound output. Yes?

Then, also, I can have other programs (like PD, CSound, amsynth, ALSA 
Modular Synth, Audacity, etc) hook into this chain somewhere, too? Do I 
connect everything together using JACK?

I'm asking all this because my present music setup on the laptop is sort 
of hodgepodged together - somehow it works, but I'm not sure how, or if 
it's even working the best way it could be.

I'm not planning to switch distros, boring Debian testing works for the 
vast majority of my needs (music writing is a smallish part of that). 
Later, I'll tackle setup/configuration of the desktop computer, which 
has more horsepower and a real sound card, and perhaps set that one up 
with an audio-focussed distro. But for now, just focusing on the laptop.

Thanks. IIRC, I also owe Julien some song lyrics, too - sorry, Julien, 
it's on the to do list!

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community