[LAU] Hydrogen questions

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