[LAU] Synths for live use

[James Stone]

OK..

Here's a quick update. On the desktop, I have now installed Ubuntu
Studio 12.04 + a few bits from kx-studio. I experimented with the full
kx-experience and found the way it took over the whole audio system -
putting everything thru jack, and making everything a ladish session a
bit much for me - but I appreciate the work that has gone into it
all.. Anyway, it all seems to be working much better than avlinux was
on that system - no crackles on linuxsampler, for example. Pulse and
jack seem to be playing together reasonably well.

On the "live" laptop - eeepc 701, I have done some more
experimentation and come up with some very surprising (to me)
discoveries.

1) Running whysynth in ghostess led to a nasty lockups when playing
too many notes (CPU couldn't cope).
2) ams - ok as monosynth (but a bit heavy for this little computer),
no really feasible to use as polyphony
3) amsynth - works very nicely, but maybe not able to create the pad
sounds etc. that I need.
4) Carla - too fiddly (for me) for live use.

Now, here's what I seem to have come down on. Amazingly all these run
on this little computer at the same time, and are capable of full
polyphony with no major xrun issues (1024 samples on jackd - might be
possible to reduce this further, but it is perfectly usable for a midi
keyboard):

1) setBfree - lovely!
2) yoshimi - amazing!
3) qsampler/linuxsampler (with rainpiano gig at the moment) - stupendous!

CPU idles around 45%, but only peaks at 60% with the first two (what I
considered pretty heavy-duty) synths. setBfree only goes up to 48%. I
think linuxsampler is the most sensitive - if I go too overboard on
the expression pedal, I can crash the whole thing - so either I don't
plug in an expression pedal for live use, or I don't use it... Might
investigate soundfonts for a piano sound if I need it.

A|ll are running on different midi channels (I had some issues with
Beatrix which segfaulted if I tried to use a midi channel it wasn't
connected to - so setBfree is a great addition).

The main issue I have at present is with yoshimi - i would like to
change program (and ideally bank) using the midi controller, but this
doesn't seem to work with the 1.0 version from kxstudio. Is this not
possible with yoshimi at present, or is there a development version I
could use?

James