[LAU] Tests of Linux DAWs

[Rob]

On Wednesday 25 July 2007, Hein Zelle wrote:
> > 4. Digitize all the MIDI tracks to audio tracks
> I've had some success tying rosegarden and ardour together to
> achieve that, you can even use pmidi with timidity or a different

Yeah, my workflow is the same as David's, but I've been using Timidity 
on the command line to render my MIDI files for subsequent 
overdubbing since 1997 (under Windows at the time), when I discovered 
it produced much cleaner results than recording analog from my Gravis 
sound card. 

I have yet to find a GUI composition tool whose MIDI to audio 
conversion process was less cumbersome than saving to a MIDI file and 
typing "timidity mysong.mid", sometimes one track at a time if I'm 
feeling obsessive-compulsive, but I do pretty much use the same 
patchset for everything.  The closest to a comfortable all-in-one 
solution I ever found was Buzz, and even then I had to render to WAV 
before overdubbing in Cool Edit or Audacity.

Maybe one of these days I'll switch to a distro whose sound support is 
all there (currently I'm using Mandriva 2007 Spring, and every few 
weeks ALSA will decide it just doesn't want to give me any sound 
anymore, not that it matters because several of the audio apps I 
installed from Mandriva packages, and want to use, have crashed 
before even letting me compose one note, including both LMMS and 
Rosegarden) but right now, the idea of setting up a sequencer that 
does its own MIDI rendering and lets me do overdubs all at once is 
still too good to be true.

Anyway, I look forward to the results of David's tests.

Rob