The recording of my first linux performance with my band Bonjour, Ganesh! from last Saturday (3-20) just got loaded up on archive.org: http://www.archive.org/details/bongan2010-03-20.flac24 I'm driving a laptop running a stripped-down Ubuntu 9.10 install with an M-Audio Axiom 61, playing a couple public domain soundfonts using fluidsynth, and bristol -hammond, all through JACK and ALSA. A complete write-up of the rig is here: http://lukepeterson.com/2010/02/07/arriving-midi-keyboard-live-rig/ I switch patches by changing the midi output channel on my controller: I've got various soundfonts attached to midi channels 1-8 and bristol running on channel 9 (and 10 and 11). I've experienced a few issues, and I'd appreciate any advice you all can offer with the following items: 1. fluidsynth (via qsynth) sometimes will unreplicably decide to start playing the patch I've got attached to channel 1 on channel 9, which means I sometimes end up getting a fair amount of Rhodes in my Hammond. It's a quick 15-second fix and it really doesn't sound all that bad, but it makes me nervous. Anybody else experienced this? 2. If I set bristol to listen to channel 1, it always plays regardless what channel I set my controller to. In the hammond implementation, channel 1 is mapped to the upper manual, channel 2 to the lower, channel 3 to the pedals. Channel 4, despite being outside of bristol's assigned range, still gives me hammond. I solve this problem by assigning bristol to the highest midi channels I'll use (since this only happens with higher channels, not lower channels), but it would be nice to have some flexibility. 3. I've read all the documentation and forum posts, and looked through the source code, but I can't for the life of me get bristol to run the mini and hammond sim synths simultaneously. 4. I need to find some way to level my patches: some of my soundfonts are much louder than others, and while my expression pedal is mapped to volume in both QSynth and bristol, transition between patches can be a bit rocky. It would be great to normalize the volume obtained from each of the patches (but still pressure-responsive), and map my expression pedal or a slider to a global volume control. I'm sure there's an easy fix, but I haven't done enough digging to find a solution. Aside from these issues, at this particular show I had almost nothing out of my monitor (a consequence of playing in a 10-piece band at a club with 3 house monitors on stage and being too lazy to bring my own), and was a little disappointed in what I felt was a bit of a distant performance. But altogether I'm proud of having figured this stuff out well enough to perform, the quality of the music and performance notwithstanding. I took a lot of advice from the archives of this list, and from forum participation and documentation authored by members of this list, so thank you very much for all your help! (and, if any of my bandmates happen to read this, I also very much appreciate their patience while I spent a bunch of rehearsals messing around with shell scripts) The most prominent keys are in Ready to Wait ( http://www.archive.org/download/bongan2010-03-20.flac24/bongan2010-03-20d01…) and The Dog Song ( http://www.archive.org/download/bongan2010-03-20.flac24/bongan2010-03-20d01… ). Thanks again, Luke ----- Luke Peterson On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:49 PM, Patrick Shirkey <pshirkey(a)boosthardware.com