On 12/28/2010 08:31 PM, Brent Busby wrote:
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.
A bit late and superfluous maybe but Hydrogen can be set up to have per
instrument JACK outputs. If you then use it with a mixer you could apply
real-time effects if you'd like to. Hydrogen can load LADSPA plugins
too, but if you use it with Qtractor or Ardour for example you can use a
wider range of plugin frameworks.
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.
Yes, this is possible. Hydrogen has a MIDI input port and you can assign
MIDI channels to the different instruments.
Best,
Jeremy