On Saturday 30 November 2002 05:42 pm, Chris Cannam wrote: You want me to say it? I'll say it. Because I'm a jerk. I didn't actually mean to send that message. I was very frustrated. I write messages like that to vent, but I try to be more tactful and appreciative in public. There's not really any excuse for my behavior, so I appologize for being a jerk. I deserve any ill will you and other volunteer developers bear toward me and my attitude. But I'm still very frustrated. MIDI is working in today's CVS, finally, long after the trouble was reported fixed. Probably the result of all the stuff I've been updating and compiling on this quest. It might be because I have a newer ALSA now, or because I stopped loading the snd-seq-oss module. I haven't managed to break it since the final (third) compile of yesterday's CVS, and I've actually gotten Rosegarden to run long enough and well enough to begin to explore it in a serious way. I've been snagging CVS for awhile. After the initial message on the matter, I got some arcane explanation as to why it was an issue, and the _impression_ that fixing it was low on the list of priorities, and that I should stop worrying about something so unimportant. I found that off-putting, since if MIDI is broken, the entire thing is completely useless. How can anything be more important to a MIDI sequencer than MIDI? That's like working on changing the layout of the dash board of a car that doesn't have an engine. I like where your project might go, if it goes there. I would probably be happier, as a user, never to have seen it at all, and then suddenly stumble across it two years from now. I think part of my antipathy toward Rosegarden stems from the user interface shift. Seemingly overnight you became this really great looking, super promising app that really doesn't work very well. I got to see the candy through the window, but when I tried to eat it, I smashed my nose on the glass; so I became bitter and cynical without just cause. It's not your fault I opened the oven before Rosegarden was done. I'm going to break off here. I've been working on this message for three hours. Every time I complain about something, I wind up going in new directions. I'm finding some of the functionality, and discovering new problems. I've found real bugs, such as the seeming inability to export useful .ly files, and my total failure to print anything by any means, so insetead of a mad dash to find new things to whine about in a haphazard way, I'm going to try to use Rosegarden on Rosegarden's own terms, and try to quit reminding myself how much I miss Cakewalk. Let me sit down and try to write something with this from start to finish, instead of starting with an imported MIDI file, and I'll try to get over my attitude and give you some useful, calm feedback, bug reports, and suggestions for how things could be done more easily from a user perspective. Or you can write me off as an asshole, and deservedly so. -- Michael McIntyre USDA zone 6b in SW VA, USA Silvan Pagan [silvan(a)windows-sucks.com] Linux Druid ---------[ registered Linux user #243621 ]--------- http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/index.html

On Monday 02 December 2002 07:14 am, Chris Cannam wrote: I'm usually very level... At least in public. :) I've been under a lot of stress lately. Someone got fired at work, and I've had to pick up his workload and mine. I've got practically no time to do this, and everything is going wrong. That's what I get for not thinking of this back when I had months and months to do it. Also, I probably hadn't eaten. I forget to eat, and when I don't eat, I get downright nasty. Most people just know that when I say something uncharacteristically nasty, it's time to feed me. :) Well, as long as I'm not the only one. :) Still, I was a total jerk. That's not the kind of message I would normally let out. At least, not without a lot of editing. Brahms wouldn't even pretend to compile the last time I looked at it, and MusE... Well, the one with my distro appears to be broken, and the CVS requires so many updates that it would be most practical to do a distro upgrade before even attempting to compile it. Jazz++ looks sort of interesting, but it seems to have been abandoned three years ago, and it isn't useful on a modern ALSA system. Anthem didn't really seem to be able to do much of anything. I had wincake working under Wine, without its staff printing font, but it's currently borked. Noteworthy Composer doesn't get its font either, so even though it works, it's pretty useless. That leaves Rosegarden and NoteEdit as things that can at least do something without my having to resort to re-installing Windows. NoteEdit has a lot of potential, but it's hard to use, and very buggy. Rosegarden has a lot of potential, but it's hard to use, and very buggy. I'm kind of stuck... :) I can relate to that. I'm not much of a programmer, but the one little thing I've been playing with doesn't work at all for a person who doesn't have a clue how to help me debug it. What can I do? It works fine here. So yes, I have to grant you that. I also grant you that MIDI is a lot more complicated than it should be, because you have to go through all the API nonsense. Life was easier when I had an ISA slot for my MPU-401. If I had an MPU-401 still, I wouldn't listen to any excuses from you. :) Touche... I'm having a bit of trouble with the whole interface paradigm too. If I import something, I get one segment for the entire track. I can cut it up with the split tool and move the segments around. If I start from scratch, I create a segment exactly one measure long. It seems your "segments" are the equivalent of the little measure dots in Cakewalk. Having one segment per measure is potentially useful, but it's also cumbersome to move blocks of stuff around, and to edit. Seems the "join" tool would let me merge segments, but it doesn't work. I can't find any way to combine segments. Should the Segments -> Auto Split item turn an imported monosegment into one segment per measure? It doesn't seem to do anything. Oh... I see... If I record something, it's one big segment, then auto-split cuts out the slient bits. So how do I make a longer segment from scratch? Didn't think of that yet? :) Um... There should be a way to move the blue "play from here" bar by hand, instead of having to futz with the transport buttons. Am I missing something? Also, playback should stop at the end of the song. It seems to continue on forever. If I let it go long enough, will Rosegarden segfault? :) What I wanted to do after I created the first one-measure segment was drag the right side of the thing out several measures. Doing _that_ would limit the flexiblity in terms of being able to copy/manipulate a measure at a time, but it would make it easier to hand edit. (I'm a really bad keyboard player, so I enter a lot of stuff from scratch...) Also, I want to do more with the segments than can seemingly currently be done. For example, select the first one, then shift-click three segments over. It should grab all the ones in between. If I want to select more than one of them individually, I should use ctrl-click, I think. Otherwise, if I click on one, it should un-select the one that was selected before. That would feel like more uniform, expected behavior. Now say I have three measures in four tracks that I want to copy. It seems I need to do a lot of stuff by hand. Cakewalk lets you select tracks on the track name/number field to the left. Actions normally work on the current track, because the current track is normally the only one selected, but you can click on additional tracks so that they mirror whatever you're doing to the track you're manipulating, and you can even have it so that the "current" track is not highlighted in this manner, so that just because you're sitting on it doesn't necessarily mean it's active for these combined manipulations. This is difficult to describe, but easy to use. Say you want to copy three measures from six different tracks. Highlight the names/numbers of those six tracks, then go into the segment pane and do your selection/dragging/copying/whatever, and those three measures will make the move in their respective tracks. There's also a "paste to one track" option for times when you want to take those snippets out and blend them together. Uh, let's see... Your Notation view is nice, but one useful addition would be giving it the ability to display more than one staff for a track. I just recorded a two-handed part, and of course there are a bunch of things on ledger lines way below the staff. Cakewalk (boo hiss) has the option to show everything on one of several different clefs, or to display a grand staff. The latter option would be ideal here. That, or some easy facility for splitting off everything below middle C and dumping it into a separate track. Now that I consider it, another thing you can do with Cakewalk's track/number highlighter thingie is that the Staff view will combine all selected staffs into one editor. That way you can tweak more than one track in the same window. I'm not subscribed to that one. I didn't know there was a user list. I'll go find it, and post this there as well. OK. I'll include the file with the bug report. If someone can figure out how to help me print staff two from the file, I'd be grateful. I got it to "say" what I want, but I can't do anything with it. Probably the lilypond just needs some cleaning up, but I don't know much about lilypond yet. It's pretty well borked. Lots of errors: 105:33: warning: Adding note head to incompatible stem (type = 8): '4 > g'16 [2] Preprocessing elements... Calculating column positions... programming error: No StaffSpacing wishes found (Continuing; cross thumbs) warning: Could not find line breaking that satisfies constraints. warning: Could not find line breaking that satisfies constraints. Etc. etc. etc. It comes out so that it might look OK if I had really wide paper. Anyway, I'll document it in the bug report. Just as soon as I dig up my sourceforge password... -- Michael McIntyre USDA zone 6b in SW VA, USA Silvan Pagan [silvan(a)windows-sucks.com] Linux Druid ---------[ registered Linux user #243621 ]--------- http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/index.html

Chris Cannam wrote: Looks like the LAU list sets Reply-To back again. Oh well. Chris

Patrick Shirkey wrote: Well, it might be handy, but really if we had time to provide a coherent brain dump we ought to have time to write some help text: even bad help text would be better than none, as it can also be edited afterwards. We have help already, it just only covers the notation editor. What might be more handy would be a tutorial from someone other than the developers ("this is how I achieved task X that I set out to do"), particularly if reviewed by one or more developers so we could point out places where things might have been done more easily another way. Chris

Le Samedi 30 Novembre 2002 21:03, vous avez écrit : There is MusE 0.6.0pre3 that worths a try. (beware the current pre4 release has a annoying bug). I like MusE, imho it is the only linux sequencer that is gowing toward something reliable and professionnal. The problem concerning your project is that MusE cannot edit score. All you can do is export a midifile and print it in another tool that will do the job. MusE works, you can edit notes, there is sometimes a silent note here but it is rare and i have the impression that it is the Alsa SBlive driver not that great. MusE can even play audio tracks along the midi tracks, i am working on a song with a few audio tracks and it works ! :) I won't do any fancing audio editing though but it seems to be stable. What important is to be able to edit your work on a stable sequencer using external midi synth or onboard synth, then export the midifile to print it if you want. If you want to be sure your midifile will play right for live sessions, manage to render the tracks in audio (using MusE or timidity or iiwuplay) and just play live on it. Linium PS: anyone using Bhrams ?

Jazz++ is a really stable and easy to use sequencer. Muse has way more features, and better note resolution, but is harder to install. http://www.brianredfern.com On Sat, 30 Nov 2002, Silvan wrote:

Le Lundi 2 Décembre 2002 18:46, vous avez écrit : It's because without midi you are forced to play, whereas midi invite you to edit and it relies on the intellectal abitlities where as playing is more action related. In fact you can use a midisequencer as a simple recorder and avoid to edit the notes. I think that way you have the advantage of the two world, a less conceptual music (and sometimes just music) and the ability to try different sound after that. Linium

On 2 Dec 2002, nick wrote: Currently, it is not working with any app because the problem is the driver. The envy24 chip is only a part of the card. DAC/ADC and SPDIF transceiver have to be added and that's were the cards are different and why the driver has to be adapted for each card. This is not a huge problem because the data sheets of the chips are available (unlike emu10k for example). But even then you have to figure out how the envy24 is talking to the other two chips. It needs to wiggle bits of his parallel port to emulate a three-wire serial interface, strange design if you ask me. The last time I did this was when I hooked up a real tty to my first microprocessor. So there are some details you need to know for a working driver. As far as I understood Midiman has not forwarded this information to the alsa developers so far. The good news is that we have figured out some of these details by tracing the connections on the circuit board. I made three tiny changes in the driver and the codec is now properly initialized, the distortion is gone (see my posts on alsa-devel). However, all I tested so far is stereo playback, so I wouldn't rely on this card for any serious work right now. Regards, Reiner