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Rosegarden?

I wrote a longer post but I lost it, so here's the links:

LMMS ("Compatible with many standards such as SoundFont2, VST(i), LADSPA, GUS Patches, and MIDI")
http://lmms.sourceforge.net/

Ardour (A DAW, but maybe useful)
http://ardour.org/

Rosegarden (Best sequencer, with Lilypad notation support, has actual printed literature you can buy)
http://www.rosegardenmusic.com...

Audacity (PCM swiss army knife ;)
http://audacity.sourceforge.ne...

The Cloudsto MK802IV LE, £80 ARM PC-onna-stick for doing music production on (Toys!!! *8D)
http://www.sonicstate.com/news...

Who needs a Mac or a PC when you can run it all on the CPU your phone uses?
Not tried it myself but for £80, I need to get one and have a go.

If you're into this type of stuff, please check out Rosegarden, it's an incredible suite similar to GarageBand but more feature filled and mature IMHO.

Pretty cool stuff out there for free, especially if you're just starting out and are a bit of a geek.

Rosegarden is an amazing piece of software, very close to garageband. Supports midi, notation, sampling, multi tracking, control external synths, really full featured. I don't know why it isn't mentioned more often.

Rosegarden and Buzztard are great for such purposes, and are both open source.

I'm not suggesting that MIDI would be better, and I'm guessing there are, in fact, some limitations of MIDI that make it inappropriate here, but I'm very curious what those limitations are, and why XML was chosen instead?

From what little experience I've had composing on the computer, I can say that MIDI doesn't create scores very well. Just importing random MIDIs to notation in RoseGarden usually ends up unreadable/unplayable by human beings. Usually it's best to keep the source format in something more exact and portable, which can then be rendered to MIDI (sort of like ripping all your samples or tracks to FLAC, and mixing to OGG for release). Last I checked, there are many pieces of software that can use MusicXML

Some links:

• Using MIDI files (in Rosegarden)
• Notation from performance data

I'm not suggesting that MIDI would be better, and I'm guessing there are, in fact, some limitations of MIDI that make it inappropriate here, but I'm very curious what those limitations are, and why XML was chosen instead?

From what little experience I've had composing on the computer, I can say that MIDI doesn't create scores very well. Just importing random MIDIs to notation in RoseGarden usually ends up unreadable/unplayable by human beings. Usually it's best to keep the source format in something more exact and portable, which can then be rendered to MIDI (sort of like ripping all your samples or tracks to FLAC, and mixing to OGG for release). Last I checked, there are many pieces of software that can use MusicXML

Some links:

• Using MIDI files (in Rosegarden)
• Notation from performance data

Lilypond is the only good open-source alternative I know of, but it isn't WYSIWYG, and I don't know of a free WYSIWYG music notation program with high quality output, i.e., the kind that a professional musician would like to use.

Musescore (cross-platform) and Rosegarden (Linux only) are GUI score editors that automatically export to LilyPond for rendering.

I like slicehost for a number of reasons, but you have to be willing to use a command line because there is no GUI unless you install one (because you're getting a virtual server with full root access).

I currently use them, for the Rosegarden website among others (wonder whether I'll regret that link -- that's running on their most basic VPS package). The connectivity appears good and I like the command-line-only approach.

What's not so good is that they only offer 64-bit distros with relatively little RAM for the price, so you can run out very easily (or pay a lot).

Really though, whatever you do your best approach to ensure you can bring up the site anywhere at short notice without losing a significant amount of data. Run your own backups, manage the DNS elsewhere, and so on. If you can afford it, maintain another ready copy of the site at a different provider.

Chris

For the new/seeking, see these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LMMS

http://lmms.sourceforge.net/

http://video.google.com/videosearch?client=opera&rls=en&q=lmms&sourceid=opera&oe=utf-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=FL14SrTCLYW0sgPfqe3xBA&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4#

http://keepthemfree.net/application/lmms-044

http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

http://linux-sound.org/notation.html

And a slew of others are starts if not replacements, depending on what any given person is after. If someone can top Rosegarden, Lilypond and LMMS, or combine the best of all these and some others, you'll probably see/hear Apple whip out the patent/copyright infringement... But, i DO have to say, Garageband is FANTASTIC. I watched a demon in the Apple Store, and it's hard (it appears) to beat GarageBand (for now?).

I'm with you. I've been using Ardour and Hydrogen for years. Also use Rosegarden for keyboard synth. My keyboard is a M-Audio 49-key USB interface, just plug it in and go. I've set up a few audio production systems for friends as well. Shane Bertrand has been recording and mixing his own music on one for 5 years now. A 10 input M-Audio Delta 1010LT sound card, Ardour, and Hydrogen are his main tools. They recorded and produced both CWO albums on this setup. They used 5 mics to record the drummer; Shane's modest system had no problems handling it all, even at more than 40 tracks in a song. He had a Sempron 2500+ and 512MB RAM w/ Kubuntu, just upgraded to a X2 3800, 2GB RAM a few months ago.

This or that application doesn't work on Linux or there isn't a comparable one (my favorite to mention is Sibelius's music notation software, aptly named Sibelius [or Coda Music's Finale, but I hate Finale]), it's not as easy to use, hardware, etc.

Some music notation software on linux (not complete list, just a quick search):

• Lilypond ( http://www.lilypond.org/ )
• Denemo ( http://denemo.sourceforge.net/index.html )
• Rosegarden ( http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/ )
• NoteEdit ( http://noteedit.berlios.de/ )
• Brahms ( http://brahms.sourceforge.net/ )

While we are at it, can you point me to a Linux program with the functionality of Logic Studio? The reason I orinally bought the Mac was that Linux just doesn't cut it for music production. I have not regretted that decision.

Ardour is a pretty darn good DAW, if a bit lacking in the MIDI sequencing department currently (I understand this is being worked on). I cover MIDI sequencing with Rosegarden and various MIDI synths. I won't try to say that Audio Production on Linux is at the same point it is on Mac (or even Windows), but for home or demo purposes, I have found it adequate. Audio production on Linux will get better faster if more people stick with it and give feedback to the developers.

Have a look at Rosegarden for notation and lilypond for typesetting.

i have no experience with music (or related software), so i'm just blindly asking whether http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/ (that i have heard is quite advanced) does anything you need ? :)

... how about giving us the option to directly open MIDI files?

You can't have those particular proprietary programs. But with the exception of iTunes, you will find programs which do the same things exactly as well. The ones you are looking for are:

• Flash player and PDF reader are available direct from Adobe. Additionaly, there are several open source flassh players, and PDF renderers are everywhere. Open source Action Script compiler here. Blender can directly generate Flash movies as good as anything produced anywhere, while lots of other Linux programs can produce some Flash output;
• Open Office; KOffice;
• granted, there's no equivalent to iTunes which will talk to the iTunes store;
• Freewheeling, SooperLooper, Audacity, Rosegarden...;
• Starry nights? Hell! you know the professionals use Linux, don't you? Start here and stop somewhere beyond the horsehead nebula...
• As for GPS software, the list is so long I don't know where to start. Anything you want to do with more or less any GPS - from professional navigation for shipping (although that's proprietary and expensive) to mapping your walks in the woods - is available. What is it you want to do?

Since IMSLP is down, I haven't been able to see how big their collection was or what it was like, but it sounds like it was scans of PD sheet music. While that could be very useful, it's obviously preferable to have your music in a format such as lilypond that you can edit. For example, I'm a violist, and right now I'm working on the prelude from one of the Bach cello suites. Once the score was in lilypond format, it was trivial to transpose it up an octave and put it in C clef. Then I was able to change the bowings and fingerings and get high-quality printed output. The Mutopia project collects scores in lilypond format. Werner Icking Music Archive has a lot of very high quality scores in musixtex format. I've posted some of my own PD scores here. Sure it's a lot more work than collecting scans, but in the long run it's the right way to go. I think the main barrier has been the lack of open-source music typesetting software that is a gui but can produce output as high in quality as lilypond ot musixtex can. Rosegarden (a gui that uses lilypond as a back end for typesetting) wasn't quite there the last time I looked, although it seems like the developers are working hard on it.

either that, edit some photos, create some music, even make a nice drawing or perhaps write a book. The fact that the Linux and *BSD excel at IT and programming jobs doesn't mean that's all they're good for, as you'd know had you actually used them.

or you could just troll on Slashdot like you're doing right now, you can use Opera or Firefox perfecly fine for that under Linux, too.

yeah, no MIDI editor = useless for me and almost every musician I know.

No comments and it's already slashdotted. Ah well. What are your thoughts on these products?

RoseGarden
Ardour
CSound

Do you really need anything else?

Well, this isn't designed to be like Logic, it's advanced tracker software instead. You probably want a sequencer software like Rosegarden: http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

check THIS out:

http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

and paired with audacity for chopping and converting samples you would have everything you need to make your own music:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

A nice drum machine:
http://www.hydrogen-music.org/

use ardour to mix it all!
http://ardour.org/

Try Rosegarden.

It's available via the package manager on Ubuntu / Debian systems and works very well for me. You can also purchase a "Live CD" with everything pre-setup for you to work on for a reasonable price.

There's nothing that's truly professional quality, which is sad, but that's the state of things. Cubase, Logic, Sonar, and Pro Tools are the four standards.

However, there IS one fairly good program for UNIX type systems, though it's nowhere near the quality of the four I mentioned above. Have a look at Rosegarden.

Ardour is a pretty good multitrack recording program, with a rich feature set. For sequencing, I'd recommend Rosegarden.

If you have any computer skills and really enjoy composing music then linux is at least as good a choice as windows. For starters, you chould checkout Rosegarden ("the closest native equivalent to Cubase® for Linux" according to Sound on Sound). If you prefer a lower-level solution then give ChucK a try. Or maybe you want a compromise of the two, perhaps similar to Max/MSP with a block diagrams interface? Look at Pure Data or jMax

If those don't tickle your fancy then maybe you should take a look at the list of Software Sound Synthesis & Music Composition Packages available for linux! Oh, and if you're completely new to linux then Ubuntu Studio offers a baby spoon-fed approach to creating a linux digital audio workstation (the project is still in its infancy, but it looks promising).

"Hmm. Of course...who's working on that free music again?

www.anvilstudio.com"

I am, for one:

http://musicians.opensrc.org/DrewRoberts

May I suggest considering a copyleft type license for your Free music?

Oh and as to programs, people might check:

http://lmms.sourceforge.net/
http://ardour.org/
http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
http://www.ferventsoftware.com/

For hardcore techies, Windows is hardly a powerful-enough network OS. Besides, most things that Web 2.0 boasts of are perfectly handled by free and open-source software that are, as mentioned in the article itself, 'increasingly available on any platform'. Firefox supports AJAX and CSS competently on Linux (better than IE6 does on Windows), and so does Opera. In fact, as more and more applications move to the web and utilities are being deployed online, the core operating system is increasingly being seen in terms of how good it is as a kernel and how powerful it is, rather than how easy it is to use and what programs are bundled with it. That's bad news for Windows.

I recently upgraded my computer, and I'm rediscovering my geeky side. As a result, I'm spending more time on the net that I used to, and I use FC4 all the time. The only thing that I use Windows for is to run Cubase (I'm a musician). The web works fine for me on Linux, I maintain my site from here (with much more ease that I could on Windows), I browse the net, I use GAIM, I lookup Wikipedia, I listen to online radio, I watch DVDs, and I download torrents.

If I wanted, I could work with music right here, I could edit videos, and much more, things that I could never do online, and for free. I'm sure Mac users have as much, or more, choice. It's not long before Windows will be seen as the 'poor man's choice', a OS that you choose to use when you aren't intelligent enough to learn any other.

Thank you for a good post.

I am currently working on an electronic music project and my intention is to release it under a GPL style licence. I will include MIDI code and directions about how instruments (hardware synths) are to be connected. This will be released in a final *.ogg format and a Rosegarden project format. Any help beyond the Creative Commons Licence is appreciated.

viva la revolution

I've been a amateur drummer for 25 years, and have tried a few software packages, but here are the ones I actually find useful.

Under Windows, for overdubbing wav and midi I mostly use Cakewalk (warning: link contains annoying self-playing music). I use the cheaper Home Studio. They have a real product differentiation problem as Sonar is the expensive product, and then they market or bundle cheaper versions that may cover your needs just fine (its hard to tell from the product descriptions which features are grayed out). I use Cakewalk because the Windows drivers can be used in a very low-latency mode, and I always have a Windows laptop kicking around. I have not liked the scoring side of Cakewalk.

Also under Windows, I have used Sibelius (version 3 and 4). It is a phenominal scoring program that produces great looking sheet music. This is the only thing I do with a PC that I think is really better than without the PC. If you score with a program that plays back what you've written via midi, you can correct many mistakes on the fly. Sibelius is unfortuately still phenominally expensive for my uses, and I've never purchased it (nor has anyone I know).

Under linux, the equivalent of Cakewalk is Rosegarden. It is very impressive at the moment. Building it is a royal pain for me. It doesn't use your standard autotools driven make, it uses Scons (not in my distribution). Scons requires a Python module that's not available in the stable version of Python. Hey, people writing free software can use whatever they want, its just a shame some people won't try their product because of the barrier to entry. I've had latency issues with Rosegarden + JACK which I think can be sorted out but I have to decide if I want to run the tools as root or pull in the whole SELinux overhead + realtime module (no different than Cakewalk in Windows -- it does not work well as non-admin). Rosegarden's scoring is coming along but not quite there for me.

For scoring under Linux, I'm using Lilypond. Lilypond is phenominal, but many won't like it because its markup-based (like writing Latex). You have to go through the compile cycle to view what you've written, and dump midi to hear it. Fortunately for me, rythym section music is very repetitive. The quality of printed music it can produce is unmatched. I'm sure more programs will start using Lilypond as a processing back-end.

I couldn't agree more. In case he's running Linux, I'd like to point out some software he could use.
Audacity - simple audio recording
Rosegarden - audio editor/sequencer
Ardour - digital audio workstation (think pro tools)

Audacity is good for simple things (cutting up parts of a song, etc) but if you're trying to do anything moderatley complex such as mixing a song, don't waste your time. Been there. Not fun. Use Ardour, which is also GPL. Don't get me wrong, I use Audacity for things like recording a riff or other ideas, but for a song it doesn't come close to cutting it. If you're wanting to do MIDI, Rosegarden (GPL) is what you want. I haven't messed with it much, though, so I can't rate it.

This is not a complete list, but Reason and GarageBand are not free nor open source, so these links might be useful:

- ardour, Digital Audio workstation / http://ardour.org/
- Rosegarden, audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment / http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
- LilyPond, music notation / http://lilypond.org/web/
- MusE MIDI/Audio sequencer / http://muse.serverkommune.de/
- Audacity, music editing station / http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
- Music Theory (free, not oss): http://www.musictheory.net/ and http://andyvn.ath.cx/Software-Aquallegro.php
- general link: http://linux-sound.org/

Cheers :-)

This is good, but what *I* really want is a competitor for MakeMusic's Finale, which is a professional-grade program for music notation

I haven't used Finale since Finale98, so I don't know how far it has come in the past 7 years or so. However, I've been really happy with RoseGarden lately. Notation is very well done.

This is good, but what *I* really want is a competitor for MakeMusic's Finale, which is a professional-grade program for music notation

I haven't used Finale since Finale98, so I don't know how far it has come in the past 7 years or so. However, I've been really happy with RoseGarden lately. Notation is very well done.

For simple songs and melodies there are various utilities that use abc music notation.
Here is a page listing them: http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/

This lets you enter music using letters and other utilities will convert it into midi or wav files.

Something similiar and free is the Guido system. It is designed to handle more complicated pieces:
http://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/AFS/GUIDO/

Another free system is Rosegarden:http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

There are a wide variety of these programs. I use NoteEdit. It was very hard for me to install it on my SuSE 9 machine, but it works well. Make sure you have TiMidity server, which is used for playback, installed and running or else NoteEdit will crash as soon as you start it, giving a cryptic error message. Sometimes running TiMidity will interfere with other sounds on my box, which is annoying, so I have to turn it on and off. If you want to print music you've inputed to NoteEdit, you need LaTeX installed. Remember, the commands to convert a LaTeX file to a musical score are:

$ latex filename.tex
$ musixflx filename.tex
$ latex filename.tex

I got this wrong for a while, even with the VERY noticable reminder from NoteEdit.

One of the other programs available is Rose Garden. Rose Garden is more mature but also less intuitive and oriented towards synthesis as opposed to performances.

If you get to be hard-core about editing scores on your Linux box, the best program around for professional score engraving will already be installed on your computer with the LaTeX distribution you aquired for printing the output from NoteEdit. See this Giant Musixtex Manual. I often typeset complex mathematics, but I have not yet been able to master musixtex, so good luck there.

I've used Rosegarden to enter a few pieces of music, and it's pretty good. I tend to focus more on tweaking the output to look exactly the way I want, and Rosegarden's output to Lilypond needed a fair bit of tweaking. Well, rewriting. :-)

There's probably a chance that Rosegarden's export to MUP or PMX or (various other options) works better. I've only recently started using Lilypond (after using MusixTeX for a while), so I'm probably not doing things in the most efficient way.

As mentioned by the AC, NoteEdit looks like a pretty good option too, though I haven't tried it myself. Hmmm... (reading features)... maybe I should. :)

Just about 8 out of 10 user support questions we get on rosegarden are actually sound setup problems. This isn't just a hardware support issue, the "final packaging" step on things like Alsa and JACK just isn't there. Yes, distribs should probably do it, but currently none does. No normal user can configure sound on linux as it is, beyond the basic 'play a .wav file'.

You can have an open source project that's gpled that is very difficult to port. If you don't write it in a scripting language like perl or python and use kernel calls instead of generic libraries you could have the source be open to all but not very portable. Case in point: Rosegarden.

Rosegarden is a gpled sound sequencer for Linux that's tied to a very low level audio library. To make a port to windows they'd have to rewrite large parts of the system which would destroy the speed of the app for limited portability.

Other ways to make porting a bitch is to write parts of the app in assembly. The system calls for Windows and Linux are worlds apart. The program could be completely open source under the gpl which anyone could look at but 95% of Linux USERS wouldn't be able to understand while looking right at it. Not very nice but even that's not required. Just use a library like ALSA and your pretty much stuck with Linux (unless someone ports ALSA, but I'm not sure that'll ever happen).

It's the nature of the beast and it killed my social life but paid my rent.

Personnaly I find the Gimp to be better for me than Photoshop. Mind you, I'm doing web design and 3-d textures, if I was a photographer I'd most likely prefer PS.

I am a musician, and one of the reasons I switched to Linux was because of greater flexibility in the audio area. Rosegarden, Audacity, Ardour, Timdity ++, Jack, and Stompboxes, along with a few other apps, have more than replaced Cubase for me, and work with significantly less latency.

While Freecraft may have been "cease and desisted" by Blizzard, the source is still out there on various "cease and desisted software" sites.

I just looked at the Pod XT page...very interesting. It shows MIDI in/out, but, also USB port on it. Have you used this to connect to a Linux box running ardour? I'm just a beginner guitar, but like playing around with the idea of recording, and have been looking at open source sequencers and music tools.

Could you expand on what you've done/tried with the Pod XT? I'm really looking for something to quickly hook my guitar into my computer...

Other music software:

• Rosegarden
• Hydrogen Drum sequencer
• Ardour: Digital Audio Workstation
• Audacity Sound Editor
• JACK Audio connection kit (Low latency)
• ZynAddSubFX Software synthesizer

Anyway, these are a few of the things I'm looking at, but, just having a hard way to find to get a guitar into my computer without expensive MIDI connectors and pickups...

Any insight here if the Pod could be used or if you have links or experience with this would be greatly appreciated!!

Rosegarden has a MIDI sequencer, a music-notation editor, audio, DSSI plugins, etc. For musicians who can read music notation, Rosegarden is probably the best available MIDI software for Linux.

Ardour multi-track sound editor (not MIDI, I think)

Rosegarden Audio and MIDI sequencer

The smaller Audacity A wave/AIFF/MP3/Ogg/etc editor

Right here.

A little plain?? Logos are supposed to be plain. Take a moment and look at some memorable logos. They're generally very, very, simple. This makes them easy to associate with the product. It helps build the brand.

If only more Free Software projects would follow the lead of NetBSD. There are a lot of decent logos out there too but by and large Free Software logos constitute strong evidence that Graphic Design is indeed a valuable skill. Not as valuable as coding, but still valuable.

Specifically, it's not about technical prowess in using your favourite graphics program, it's about being able to come up with strong ideas and express them strikingly, visually.

Not that I'm any good at it...

JACK uses a callback based API much like Core Audio.

Basically every high-end (e.g. ardour, JAMin, Rosegarden, Hydrogen, etc.) uses it.

You can get really low latency using it if you have good sound hardware (e.g. RME Hammerfall for extremely low latency or even an M-Audio Delta 1010). Something like an SBLive! (what I have) will need a period size of 2048 bytes with two periods to avoid underrunning (I have a Dual AthlonMP 2800+ so I'm pretty sure it's the sound card...). Stuff like QJackCtl and Jack-Rack make controlling Jack easy.

Getting realtime mode working for a normal user can be tricky, but Debian makes it really easy. Just install the realtime-lsm package and build the realtime-lsm-source package for your kernel and all users in the audio group gain the ability to run applications realtime (at least with the default config). It could be made easier (mainly by prebuilding the realtime-lsm modules for the stock kernels) but GNU/Linux pro-audio is still mostly for hackers and adventurous people right now. Stuff like PlanetCCRMA and AGNULA are aiming to make everything work out of the box. I have yet to try either (I use Debian so PlanetCCRMA is useless for me) but it looks like DeMuDi has everything set up for recording out of the box.

How does Muse compare to Rosegarden?