Is it in the same category as audacity (a competitor), or do the two complement each other? What kind of program is rezound? OK, this confirms my general impression. Ardour is out. I am tempted to go with muse. Yes, I did have a look, but it is not so helpful because they are much less space-constrained than I am, and therefore do not have to make the same difficult choices. Thanks for your comments. Conrad

OK, I will have a look. The CD is more multi-purpose than dynebolic, not just multimedia, but games (mostly to get everyone interested), plus a windows installer for mozilla and openoffice. The windows installer alone reduces the available space for program by around 200MB, since it is 60MB large, and the cloop compression ratio is roughly 3 to 1. There are math and science programs as well, so I have to be very careful in my choices. rosegarden4, for example, is 11.5 MB large. I believe that csound with cecilia is similarly large. When in addition you have applications like celestia (32MB, interplanetary travel) and maxima (25MB, symbolic manipulation program), it starts to add up . . . You are right, I could delete one of the larger games and install more music software instead, but before I do that I need to be convinced that people would really _use_ the music software---I know they will play the games. There is also the political aspect: since this is a Linux promotional CD, I do not want people to come back and say, "hey, this application is so complicated as to be useless--- Linux is useless . . ." I want them to succeed in their endeavours and to feel that Linux improves their lives. The best situation is to have a powerful program with an intuitive interface that lives up to expectations. We all know how difficult that is . . . ;-) Of course I want to have more music software. That is why I started this thread, to try to suck out the best of the available programs. Conrad

On Friday 09 Jan 2004 12:29 am, derek holzer wrote: That could also be a description of Sweep, which is another program I think is well worth a look at. (I've never used Rezound myself, as I've never gone to the trouble to install the GUI toolkit it needs.) Chris

is a That's a good point. Multiplatform is nice because your students may then want to experiment at home, but be not quite ready for linux yet. Audacity, PD, and Csound all run well under windows too and make a fun ( and powerful! ) combination. Iain

Another vote for MusE, On Thursday 08 January 2004 23:24, Conrad Newton wrote: MusE doesn't require jackd to produce results, It is much more immediate than rosegarden4. You probably want a softsynth or two to go with. Cecilia makes csound a little more open to people who aren't used to the command line. You still have to learn csound, however. Fortunately Dave Phillips has written some excellent tutorials. You choose... HTH tim hall

Thanks for your recommendation, it will be included. Conrad

On Thursday 08 Jan 2004 11:24 pm, Conrad Newton wrote: Rosegarden does need JACK for audio, yes. If you only want MIDI and notation -- and when I say MIDI I include the ability to drive ALSA soft synths such as Timidity, qsynth or Fluidsynth -- then you can build it happily without JACK or run a JACK-built version without running jackd. Chris

On Friday 09 Jan 2004 10:03 am, Conrad Newton wrote: Rosegarden uses JACK to record and play audio files, i.e. WAVs. If you want to include audio clips in a composition or record audio using Rosegarden then you need to have it compiled with JACK and you need jackd running. If you only want to use Rosegarden to edit MIDI and score and to play to and record from MIDI devices, whether they're soundcard synths, hardware such as keyboards, or soft-synths, then you don't need to compile with JACK or run jackd. MIDI and score support in Rosegarden are stronger than audio support at the moment anyway, so this might not be too much of a loss. So, for example, you will be able to import MIDI files, edit them as score, record additional tracks from a MIDI keyboard, arrange and play the results through a separate qsynth or a soundcard synth, drive other MIDI applications such as Hydrogen, etc; you just won't be able to record the results as audio back into Rosegarden, or add audio samples to your composition. Note that the soft synths Rosegarden can use (such as fluidsynth, qsynth or timidity) are separate applications that you have to run independently and that are then driven from Rosegarden; Rosegarden does not include or host synths itself. MusE has a possible advantage in this respect as it does have a fluidsynth implementation built-in, as well as being able to drive other synths in the same way as Rosegarden. (btw, "compiling without JACK" and "compiling with JACK but running without jackd" are pretty much the same thing, by the way -- either way you get all the MIDI and score support but no direct audio support. There are two differences: first, if you compile with JACK you need to have libjack.so installed for Rosegarden to start; and second, if you compile without JACK you're eliminating any possibility of an enterprising user choosing to run jackd as well at a later time.) Chris

Although (and correct me if I'm mistaken) doesn't Rosegarden (I'm talking about Rosegarden-4) allow syncing with other programs via jack_connect? I know that JACK can be challenging and I know that jack_connect is still new (I think). And so the question would be "what multitrack recorder to sync it up to"? I know that ecasound is (not) for the "average user", but now there's "TKeca" which is a front end to ecasound (see the links below). Since this gentleman is asking about software I'll explain ecasound and the gui front end "TKeca". Ecasound is a command line multi-track recorder and effects processor that has many other features (too many to mention and I would probly leave some out). It's very stable, powerful, no-nonsense command line progam that you can use "TKeca" as the gui interface (links below). I've used TKeca and it is very strait forward and (like ecasound) pretty stable. TKeca starts up quickly and is pretty intuitive and easy to use. I'm not sure if ecasound is difficult to set up or not because I've been using it for so long that I know a lot about how it does it's business. But I can tell you that I've *never* had a problem compiling the program. If I install the (stated) dependencies, it always compiles and installs correctly (unlike a lot of programs). And you don't (have to) install some of the programs that ecasound uses (unless you want) I'm talking about the progams that do things like converting to mp3, or converting a midi file to a WAV (via timidity soft synth). So there's a bunch of program that you (may not) even need when installing ecasound. I found that just recoding WAV's is the best because you can do "seeks" with them anyways ("jump" to a specific time in the song, or proper fast forward or rewind functioning). File formats like mp3 don't allow for proper "seeks" (and possibly maybe not even fast forwarding or rewinding). TKeca takes advantage of all this. And there's no extra components (other programs) to install just to record WAV tracks. Ecasound (and therefor TKeca) take advantage of the LADSPA effects plug in system. So the user can put 4 effect on any track at any time. The sliders to adjust the effects work in real time. In other words, you can change the depth of a reverb effect as you track is playing so that you hear the changes in real time. The only thing that I can say negative about TKeca is that it doesn't monitor the effects as you record. But when you stop recording and play a track, you can add up to four effects per track. TKeca also has a "roll-in" mechanism. It allows for specified amount of seconds of playing before the actual recording starts. Another words, If you record (for instance) the vocal part that goes "My big legged momma loves a man that aint me" and you sang out of key on the word "momma". Well you don't want to just press record over the part that needs fixing, because it's too abrupt. Most people would like to hear the parts that leads into the spot that needs recording over. It will "pre-roll" into the specified part you want to record over. And when it gets to that part, will start recording at that point only. On the last version I tried, the roll-in mechanism worked, but you had to start from the beginning of the song. I hope that was fixed in the latest version. I only used some basic parts of the (new) version of TKeca, so I can't vouch for it completly. But I would be glad to be of assistance if you want to install both of those programs. This email is getting long. But I wanted to share some of my experiences with muse. It not only has several "built in" soft synths, but two (perticulary) will provide a complete set of sound. There's actually two soft synths in the "first" catagory of soft synths. I'm talking about soft synths that use sound fonts. They are "fluidsynth" and "Fluid". I don't know if these programs are related, but I did a "side-by-side" comparison of the sound of both of them and found that "fluid" sounded much better than "Fluidsynth". And if you download the sound font "FluidR3 GM.SF2" from the link below, I think you will be happy with what you find. It is 141 Megs but it's worth every bit of download time because they are "sterio panned" "real" instruments. The "end users" don't even have to worry about doing any panning. I put a couple of intruments on a few tracks and they were panned beautifully together. I really like this font. The other advantage of the softsynth "Fluid" (instead of "Fluidsynth") is that once you load a soundfont into "Fluid" and then save muse's configuration, the soundfont will load automatically into "Fluid" when you start muse again. I could'nt get "Fluidsynth" to do this. I had to reload the font every time I started the program. And if you want to make this easy on the end user, you may want to use the "Fluid" soft synth. The second catagoy of softsynths that come with it are the buzzy "synthy" sounds that are electronically produced. In fact the "vam" softsynth has an interface for some pretty good control over the sound. And not only can you move sliders in real time to get all kinds of cool "buzzy" sounds while your playing, but I even was able to use the sliders on some already pre-recorded midi tracks as they were playing. So you have real intruments and you have buzzy (synth sounding) intruments. I get the impression that the "live recoding" capababilities (using a microphone and "real" instrument as opposed to midi recording) isn't very good at this time with muse. And that's why I suggested TKeca. And if you can find a midi recorder that syncs with jack_connect, then you have the best of both worlds. Actaully, here's a bunch of links... The "FluidR3 GM.SF2" sound font... http://inanna.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~swh/fluid-unpacked/ ecasound home page... http://www.eca.cx/welcome.html TKeca download page... http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=63518 While we're on the subject of programs built on top of ecasound. This next one is an "effects box" (my terminoligy) that uses all the functionality of ecasound. It's called Ecamegapedal... http://www.wakkanet.fi/~kaiv/ecamegapedal/ I think these are good programs. And if you have the patience, if you get jack running well, it opens up the possibility of using jack_connect to sycronize programs. I (think) that there's (not) a lot out there that takes advantage of it. One of my biggest hopes was to install the latest version of the "Hydrogen" drum machine because the version that came with SuSE 9.0 doesn't have the jack transport functions (for syncronizing with other programs). I spent a whole night satisfying all the dependencies. It built without a hitch, but it just wont start up properly. I'm now using Hydrogen 0.8.0-80 (that came with SuSE 9.0 distribution) and I really like it. Maybe I just don't have a lot of experience with linux drum machines, but these are the first good drum samples that I've heard. I've never been satisfied with any drum sample that I've heard prior to using Hydrogen. And you can get "drum kits" online (I haven't downloaded any yet). But Hydrogen is not only easy to use, but the manual is easy to understand also. You know, I really avoided jack because it just added another layer of problems. But I connected Hydrogen up to it and the latency (the amount of time from pressing the keyboard to the time the sound came out) disappeared. And I was using the lowest buffer size when (not) hooked up the jack and couldn't get good response time until I hooked it up to jack. In fact I get immediate responce time. There's a program called qjackconnect that allows for a point and click connecting of programs and devices when using jack so you don't have to go into the shell and type cryptic command to hook up programs and devices (and then not hook up correcty after all the effort). And since I'm speaking of connections. The one that hooks up things like your midi keyboard to synths (and things like that) is called "kaconnect". What I like about it, is that it not only shows (in the windows) what there is to connect together but (for me) it makes it easy to understand how all these cryptic things actually work. And (I'm assuming) it will make "aconnect" (command line program that kaconnect runs) easier to understand when it comes to adding it into scripts so that these devices will automatically connect apon starting up programs. Prior to kaconnect, I couldn't visualize what a 65:0 or a 192:0 was (or why there was a 65:0, 65:1, 65:2 and... 65:3). Both kaconnect and qjackconnect puts them in front of you in two boxes ("from" ports and "to" ports). You just connect them with mouse clicks. I'm becoming a bit long winded, but what I'm trying to say is, you could get along well without jack, but I'm just wondering if (after a while) it will become difficult to (not) use jack. I know that some of the newer versions of programs I've seen are building as "jack only" apps. So I finally gave in and did the research nessesary (and it was painful) I was wondering if this would be a good time for us to use this situation to get this gentlman up and running with jack. Maybe we can all just "push thru" and get him set up. That way we can have a thurough conversation about setting up jack. I'm sure I'll learn a lot also. It's not that jack is that complex. It's just finding the information nessesary. You know... "were is the information... is it relivant to what I'm doing... what is this other aspect they are talking about... do I even need it... where can I find that information..." Rocco Although (and correct me if I'm mistaken) doesn't Rosegarden (I'm talking about Rosegarden-4) allow syncing with other programs via jack_connect? I know that JACK can be challenging and I know that jack_connect is still new (I think). And so the question would be "what multitrack recorder to sync it up to"? I know that ecasound is (not) for the "average user", but now there's "TKeca" which is a front end to ecasound (see the links below). Since this gentleman is asking about software I'll explain ecasound and the gui front end "TKeca". Ecasound is a command line multi-track recorder and effects processor that has many other features (too many to mention and I would probly leave some out). It's very stable, powerful, no-nonsense command line progam that you can use "TKeca" as the gui interface (links below). I've used TKeca and it is very strait forward and (like ecasound) pretty stable. TKeca starts up quickly and is pretty intuitive and easy to use. I'm not sure if ecasound is difficult to set up or not because I've been using it for so long that I know a lot about how it does it's business. But I can tell you that I've *never* had a problem compiling the program. If I install the (stated) dependencies, it always compiles and installs correctly (unlike a lot of programs). And you don't (have to) install some of the programs that ecasound uses (unless you want) I'm talking about the progams that do things like converting to mp3, or converting a midi file to a WAV (via timidity soft synth). So there's a bunch of program that you (may not) even need when installing ecasound. I found that just recoding WAV's is the best because you can do "seeks" with them anyways ("jump" to a specific time in the song, or proper fast forward or rewind functioning). File formats like mp3 don't allow for proper "seeks" (and possibly maybe not even fast forwarding or rewinding). TKeca takes advantage of all this. And there's no extra components (other programs) to install just to record WAV tracks. Ecasound (and therefor TKeca) take advantage of the LADSPA effects plug in system. So the user can put 4 effect on any track at any time. The sliders to adjust the effects work in real time. In other words, you can change the depth of a reverb effect as you track is playing so that you hear the changes in real time. The only thing that I can say negative about TKeca is that it doesn't monitor the effects as you record. But when you stop recording and play a track, you can add up to four effects per track. TKeca also has a "roll-in" mechanism. It allows for specified amount of seconds of playing before the actual recording starts. Another words, If you record (for instance) the vocal part that goes "My big legged momma loves a man that aint me" and you sang out of key on the word "momma". Well you don't want to just press record over the part that needs fixing, because it's too abrupt. Most people would like to hear the parts that leads into the spot that needs recording over. It will "pre-roll" into the specified part you want to record over. And when it gets to that part, will start recording at that point only. On the last version I tried, the roll-in mechanism worked, but you had to start from the beginning of the song. I hope that was fixed in the latest version. I only used some basic parts of the (new) version of TKeca, so I can't vouch for it completly. But I would be glad to be of assistance if you want to install both of those programs. This email is getting long. But I wanted to share some of my experiences with muse. It not only has several "built in" soft synths, but two (perticulary) will provide a complete set of sound. There's actually two soft synths in the "first" catagory of soft synths. I'm talking about soft synths that use sound fonts. They are "fluidsynth" and "Fluid". I don't know if these programs are related, but I did a "side-by-side" comparison of the sound of both of them and found that "fluid" sounded much better than "Fluidsynth". And if you download the sound font "FluidR3 GM.SF2" from the link below, I think you will be happy with what you find. It is 141 Megs but it's worth every bit of download time because they are "sterio panned" "real" instruments. The "end users" don't even have to worry about doing any panning. I put a couple of intruments on a few tracks and they were panned beautifully together. I really like this font. The other advantage of the softsynth "Fluid" (instead of "Fluidsynth") is that once you load a soundfont into "Fluid" and then save muse's configuration, the soundfont will load automatically into "Fluid" when you start muse again. I could'nt get "Fluidsynth" to do this. I had to reload the font every time I started the program. And if you want to make this easy on the end user, you may want to use the "Fluid" soft synth. The second catagoy of softsynths that come with it are the buzzy "synthy" sounds that are electronically produced. In fact the "vam" softsynth has an interface for some pretty good control over the sound. And not only can you move sliders in real time to get all kinds of cool "buzzy" sounds while your playing, but I even was able to use the sliders on some already pre-recorded midi tracks as they were playing. So you have real intruments and you have buzzy (synth sounding) intruments. I get the impression that the "live recoding" capababilities (using a microphone and "real" instrument as opposed to midi recording) isn't very good at this time with muse. And that's why I suggested TKeca. And if you can find a midi recorder that syncs with jack_connect, then you have the best of both worlds. Actaully, here's a bunch of links... The "FluidR3 GM.SF2" sound font... http://inanna.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~swh/fluid-unpacked/ ecasound home page... http://www.eca.cx/welcome.html TKeca download page... http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=63518 While we're on the subject of programs built on top of ecasound. This next one is an "effects box" (my terminoligy) that uses all the functionality of ecasound. It's called Ecamegapedal... http://www.wakkanet.fi/~kaiv/ecamegapedal/ I think these are good programs. And if you have the patience, if you get jack running well, it opens up the possibility of using jack_connect to sycronize programs. I (think) that there's (not) a lot out there that takes advantage of it. One of my biggest hopes was to install the latest version of the "Hydrogen" drum machine because the version that came with SuSE 9.0 doesn't have the jack transport functions (for syncronizing with other programs). I spent a whole night satisfying all the dependencies. It built without a hitch, but it just wont start up properly. I'm now using Hydrogen 0.8.0-80 (that came with SuSE 9.0 distribution) and I really like it. Maybe I just don't have a lot of experience with linux drum machines, but these are the first good drum samples that I've heard. I've never been satisfied with any drum sample that I've heard prior to using Hydrogen. And you can get "drum kits" online (I haven't downloaded any yet). But Hydrogen is not only easy to use, but the manual is easy to understand also. You know, I really avoided jack because it just added another layer of problems. But I connected Hydrogen up to it and the latency (the amount of time from pressing the keyboard to the time the sound came out) disappeared. And I was using the lowest buffer size when (not) hooked up the jack and couldn't get good response time until I hooked it up to jack. In fact I get immediate responce time. There's a program called qjackconnect that allows for a point and click connecting of programs and devices when using jack so you don't have to go into the shell and type cryptic command to hook up programs and devices (and then not hook up correcty after all the effort). And since I'm speaking of connections. The one that hooks up things like your midi keyboard to synths (and things like that) is called "kaconnect". What I like about it, is that it not only shows (in the windows) what there is to connect together but (for me) it makes it easy to understand how all these cryptic things actually work. And (I'm assuming) it will make "aconnect" (command line program that kaconnect runs) easier to understand when it comes to adding it into scripts so that these devices will automatically connect apon starting up programs. Prior to kaconnect, I couldn't visualize what a 65:0 or a 192:0 was (or why there was a 65:0, 65:1, 65:2 and... 65:3). Both kaconnect and qjackconnect puts them in front of you in two boxes ("from" ports and "to" ports). You just connect them with mouse clicks. I'm becoming a bit long winded, but what I'm trying to say is, you could get along well without jack, but I'm just wondering if (after a while) it will become difficult to (not) use jack. I know that some of the newer versions of programs I've seen are building as "jack only" apps. So I finally gave in and did the research nessesary (and it was painful) I was wondering if this would be a good time for us to use this situation to get this gentlman up and running with jack. Maybe we can all just "push thru" and get him set up. That way we can have a thurough conversation about setting up jack. I'm sure I'll learn a lot also. It's not that jack is that complex. It's just finding the information nessesary. You know... "were is the information... is it relivant to what I'm doing... what is this other aspect they are talking about... do I even need it... where can I find that information..." Rocco

It does, and it works pretty easily, makes it very easy to do granular synthesis and has some good built in demos. On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Conrad Newton wrote: