[LAU] Rosegarden which Distro?

[Lorenzo Sutton]

Hi John,

On 10/11/19 18:00, John Whitmore wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> First post so obviously a newbie question. And this, I know, is a question
> without answer, as it's a bit subjective. So what is the most convinient
> distro to get started on.

[...]
> 
> I've previosuly been using an Ubuntu distro which worked up to a point, that
> point being 'rosegarden'. I really wanted to play with rosegarden so I could
> enter musical notation and list to the results. That was a step too far for
> me. 

As you say this is really subjective, but I'm quite happy since a while 
with Manjaro which is an Arch spin-off. Audio-wise it has realtime 
kernel packaged out of the box as well as most common audio applications.

Final thought, although not distro related, for your use case I'd grab a 
'gernal midi' soundfont (for instance the FluidR3_GM one - also packaged 
as 'soundfont-fluid' - and connect rosegarden to it vie either 
fluidsynth (command line), or qsynth (fluiidsynth frontend), or one of 
the fluidsynth plugins.

For example if I need to quickly sketch something (and am not too bother 
by quality). I fire up qjacktrl, start rosegarden and then have a script 
ready like this:

fluidsynth -j -l /path/to/FluidR3_GM.sf2 -o synth.polyphony=512

Of course this could be even further automated with a script launching, 
jack, then rosegarden, then fluidsynth :)

Hope this helps,
Lorenzo.