Re: [linux-audio-user] Any MIDI apps that don't suck?

Silvan wrote: Well, what can I say? I have to admit I was surprised by your message, because your one previous communication on the Rosegarden lists had been very level. I can understand your frustration though -- the older I get, the more likely I am to just declare that a piece of software is crap and give up on it when it won't immediately work for me. (For a long time I refused to give either MusE or Brahms any serious consideration because I couldn't get either of them to start up cleanly and make sounds without a significant amount of work.) The MIDI code in Rosegarden-4 has come a long way. MIDI is not quite as easy as it seems, particularly when you take into account managing things like tempo changes, repeats and loops, when you're trying (perhaps misguidedly, for historical reasons) to support more than one MIDI API at once, and when you're trying to keep a GUI in sync at the same time. That's only an excuse -- there are plenty of MIDI applications that work better than Rosegarden did when you tried it out last. Your complaint was one of several at about the same time describing some problems that we Rosegarden developers did not actually see, which made it quite difficult for us to debug them. That's an artifact of the fact that we have more than one developer working on separate parts of the application, with varying amounts of workload and (usually very limited) time available. While one guy irons out those bugs in the MIDI code that prevent you from finding the application usable at all, another is frustrating you by polishing the GUI endlessly even though the MIDI code doesn't work. But that's just the way it is: the one doing the GUI work is better placed to work on GUI and is not in a position to fix your problems with MIDI, while the MIDI guy is better placed to work on MIDI but not on (say) crashes in the notation editor. That doesn't mean the MIDI code has a lower priority. It's surely the way that most software development works, it's just that in a closed environment you wouldn't get to see it. Bear in mind too that we've only fairly recently started declaring that Rosegarden-4 is likely to be of interest to anyone except a few sympathetic developers, and we're still some way from 1.0. This also means that relatively few people have used the software in any serious way yet, so you _will_ discover all sorts of new problems, and you should report them. You should definitely report that (to rosegarden-user, and bug reports to the SourceForge bug trackers). I find Lilypond output works okay, and I imagine it has even fewer regular users than the rest of the application, so bugs you find are highly likely to be new to us. You'd be very welcome. Chris