[linux-audio-user] soft synth manager gui

A number of people using the Rosegarden sequencer for MIDI (myself included) are principally using it to drive ALSA soft synths such as iiwusynth or timidity. Unlike (say) MusE, which allows you to start and stop soft synths from the sequencer itself, Rosegarden treats soft synths just like any other MIDI device: it knows nothing special about them except the name that ALSA returns. It's the user's responsibility to start and stop synths and ensure that the right patches and so forth are available. This makes for quite a bit of flexibility, but means that the average user who runs a small number of synths but changes the patch sets (soundfonts or whatever) frequently has a little bit of a management problem in ensuring that the correct setup for a given composition is always available. What I imagine would be useful is a generic probably-GUI-driven app that simply starts and stops soft synths, particularly synths that are driven using the ALSA MIDI API, that output to JACK, and that might not have GUIs of their own (admittedly the only one of those I can think of right now is iiwusynth, but I'm sure there are others and even if you only use iiwusynth you could have any number of different soundfont configurations). As well as starting and stopping synths on command, it might be able to store and recall a selection of multi-synth studio setups of the user's design. It'd be particularly neat if the soft-synth manager could itself be driven remotely through some sort of MIDI control event. Is there such a thing as this? (Anyone feel like writing one?) Is there any other way of arranging synths and suchlike so that this sort of application is not actually necessary, assuming that we want to maintain the current arrangement where Rosegarden does not take responsibility for running the synths itself? Chris