[LAU] Lightweight, small-screen-real-estate sequencer?

[Brent Busby]

On Sat, 12 Feb 2011, Chris Cannam wrote:

> On 12 February 2011 16:54, Brent Busby <brent at keycorner.org> wrote:
>> If you ever get the old Rosegarden working, let us know.  Lots of people
>> seem to think that it's necessary to make something run on GTK or QT to make
>> it look good.  I actually loved the look of the old Rosegarden.
>
> It's not just a question of looks though, of course.  These "proper"
> toolkits provide many basic usability features, including such obvious
> things as keyboard shortcuts and menus that don't go away when you
> release the mouse button, that were absent from Prehistoric
> Rosegarden's Athena-based widgets.

Yeah, that's true, and I realize how awful it is to directly program 
xlib.  But sometimes the results that people come up with when they're 
forced to make their own widgets look better to me though than what the 
any of the toolkits offer.

> Though I did have a soft spot for that flat monochrome look -- which 
> was partly a design consequence of doing much of the initial work 
> using genuinely mono displays (huge, high-resolution Sun CRT monitors 
> supporting black and white pixels only, no greyscale).

I think it makes the whole desktop is less gaudy if everything window on 
the screen isn't trying to use all sixteen million colors by itself.

> Looks aside, if you tried Antique Rosegarden again now I'm sure you'd 
> be surprised by how little it could actually do.

Well, one application niche that doesn't seem to be very well filled 
though is minimal *console* sequencers for gigging.  In fact, you could 
go further than X11 Rosegarden and ask why there aren't any good 
sequencers that run off a console VTY with complete keyboard navigation 
for everything.

I think a lot of people, if they could have a sequencer that gives them 
zero concerns over window size and position, widget-dragging, pulldown 
menus, and all that other stuff that makes you have to mouse around like 
an idiot on stage, and runs on a thin no-X11 system with Alsa/Jack and 
not much else, they might be in heaven.

There used to be sequencers like that for DOS, but the only problem was 
that they ran on DOS, which had almost no Midi support without seriously 
ugly kludges, especially on laptops that had no soundcards with Midi. 
(Remember those terrible parallel port interfaces?)

Today you could have the full Alsa/Jack services on a VTY, running on a 
very thin Linux system, if there was a console sequencer that was made 
to run like that.  And everything could be done with hotkeys and arrow 
key navigation.  Really fast and light, like the old DOS sequencers used 
to be.

-- 
+ 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