[LAU] Hydrogen questions

[Brent Busby]

My old MPC2000 (non-XL) is starting to act oddly, and it has got me 
thinking about whether I should even continue depending on the Akai 
hardware, which generates rock solid sequencer time, but is eventually 
going to be unmaintainable, and leave me with a lot of sequences and 
sample libraries in various odd proprietary formats.

So while I'm working on getting my MPC working again, I'm also checking 
into the possibility of replacing its usefulness with a mixture of 
Hydrogen, Jack, Linuxsampler, and Ardour.  There are a few questions 
though:

1) This is probably pretty basic, but...can you send each
    drum/instrument in a Hydrogen kit out a different physical audio
    output in Jack?  My whole setup is very much based on physical
    hardware -- a real mixer board, real rack effects, etc.  I haven't
    heard a Ladspa plugin yet that offered EQ that really satisfied me
    much, and I'm used to being able to do EQ on my mixer from the 10
    outputs of my MPC, individually, per track, and also using rack
    effects from the effects loops and a real hardware patchbay.  I could
    keep doing that if I can send individual Hydrogen tracks out to audio
    outputs on my RME Multiface.  I could also add more outputs as
    needed.  It'd be ideal if you could just route individual tracks to
    hardware outputs via Jack.

2) Hydrogen seems a lot like the Roland TR-series drum machines, based
    on putting notes on "ticks" on a grid.  I didn't see much mention of
    free-form human feel drumming though.  Is there a way to just not
    quantize at all, and realize at least a standard 96 ticks per quarter
    note type of resolution (or more)?

3) Also, all the discussion of entering rhythms in the documentation
    seemed to involve using the QWERTY keyboard, which obviously isn't
    going to be velocity-sensitive.  Is there a way to have an outboard
    synthesizer keyboard (or even better, my Simmons drumset with Roland
    PM16 pad-to-midi) play or sequence Hydrogen patterns via midi, with
    full velocity sensitivity?  QWERTY keyboard is an awful way to have
    to sequence.

4) If these are things that are beyond Hydrogen's abilities, would I be
    better off trying to go through Muse or Rosegarden to achieve these
    things?  Or maybe just stick with hardware samplers for now?  I'm
    mostly attracted to the idea of doing sampling and sequencing on FOSS
    software rather than on hardware samplers because the saved data
    doesn't have orphanhood in its future that way.

Any ideas on how best to go about making Linux audio software replace an 
Akai MPC?

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin	 +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky