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What Is The State Of MIDI Support Under Linux?
CodeShark asks: "I am 99% ready to completely wipe all Windows software from my machines, but the last 1% I need to do so is an effective MIDI
system that includes: a multitrack midi sequencer, a sound librarian, and notation software (outputting the midi tracks to sheet music). I've tried searching via the Web with little luck, and am wondering what is out there/in development. I'd even be willing to pick up and/or start an Open Source project in this area myself, but I don't have a lot of knowledge of where to start. Suggestions anyone?" I'm hoping that with all the newfound popularity, someone has already started exploring with Linux in music production.
There are at least two projects for professional typesetting of scores: lilypond and MusixTeX (the latter has been partly merged with the former). Concerning sequencers, I am quite happy with rosegarden, but I am no professional.
MIDI's a good ol' aging-yet-standard hardware control protocol but abc is a language; ok a primitive language. But it's at a higher level of abstraction than MIDI, and it's both human and machine readable. abc projects seem to be fairly live. there's a large body of musical pieces encoded in abc and online. it can easily be emailed... anyway, worth a look and there are filters to PS score and to MIDI.
abc2ps and abcm2ps are imho way easier to use than anything MusicTeX-based (I have tried both). And they produce darned nice looking score -- I and a colleague did the 2nd movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony, for grins, in full score from the Dover edition.
abc2midi is reliable. midi2abc is, well, it needs a little human help sometimes. but midi to score is a nontrivial problem, as others have pointed out. abc and its tools are very Linux-y really, in what I think of as the good sense: modular, minimalist, very functional.
I used the OSS driver package reluctantly (eee-yew, yuck, it isn't free); I needed just honest MPU 401 support for external modules -- and I was as disappointed as everyone else who ever used a good sequencer on an old, feeble Mac. Those pathetic 68K based products did realtime MIDI miles better than anything I tried under Linux.
IMHO we have a wealth of tools for MIDI-as-data -- i.e. tclmidi, abc2midi, playmidi and a lot more, and a goodly selection of tools for exotic sound cards; but we're still fumbling around for basic bread-n-butter MIDI sound module control and RT sequencing/playback. I could do this with a Mac II si 10 years ago so it's kind of embarrassing... I wish I were a driver maven instead of a lowly app/database hacker. I'm placing my bet on ALSA, but feels like they are at least another year away from being as "real" as, say Linux scanner support or the digital camera stuff.
Linux has terrible midi hardware support. Its all mediocre at best. It does a fine job of playing .mid files with the crappy internal FM Synth/Wavetable samples but for external sequencing its nothing but trouble.
If you do manage to come across a card with stable drivers, check out Brahms (Formally KooBase), check www.freshmeat.net for the url of the site. Its a clone of CuBase for KDE.
I gave up windows 3 years ago, and just bought a used mac to do my midi work on. Allthough not the most economical choice, I find it easier to keep my music system and my reg system seperated.
A LOT of midi musicians and electronic artists in general would probably LOVE to see audio apps come to a stable OS like Linux.
I talk with a lot of musicians who work with computers and they always say "A computer is a great tool, but its just so unstable(unreliable, etc etc). Allthough, Linux isn't user friendly enough to reach the masses of electronic musicians, but with the steady progress on desktop envs etc this shouldnt be an issue 3 years down the road (and hopefully in that 3 years, we develope some halfway decent midi drivers!).
I wrote an article for Electronic Musician magazine that was published in the 06/99 issue, titled "The Penguin's Song," about the state of music hardware and software support for Linux as of Spring of last year.
Unfortunately, the 06/99 issue seems to be the only one that's not archived on their very kludgy website. I've pestered the parent company, Intertec, a couple of times about this, and they keep alleging they're going to fix it.
The article's not completely about MIDI support on Linux, since it also touches on hardware and audio support, but sort of topical to this question. Unfortunately, if you'd like to see the final version of this article, you'll either have to buy the back issue or pester EM's parent company to get the 06/99 issue into the archives.
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Although the original author never requested this, I feel I should speak up on one of my projects: A midi to guitar tab converter that works, but I haven't released yet. Also, the midi reading part is pretty general-purpose, so I'd probably do pretty good to release it as a separate lib.
All (L)GPL'd, of course.
As the subject says... ALSA 0.55 does very nice sounding MIDI playback with PlayMidi and SoundFonts. Or if you're willing to trade freedom for functionality Creative has binary-only drivers coming out that support all Windows features, including EAX-style effects via accelerate OpenAL.
"That's nonsense" Don't be so harsh! I think the poster was trying to characterize the fact that, for example, a staccato pizicanto quarter note for a string, might need to be translated from it's standard representation to something shorter, in order to make your midi sound right. Of course, if your synth is any good, you could pick a staccato pizicanto fiddle and send it a quarter note. regards, fishbowl, who just wants a rackmount synth
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Where do you get this information?
Read before you speak.
Well, I just re-read the whole FAQ and I still don't see anywhere that it says that I can install it without Windows. It does say that it is not actually running under Windows, but gives no indication that it can be started without Windows.
There is no FAQ that says "Q. Do I need Windows?" The closest is the one I quoted.
The BeNews article claimed that you could install w/out Windows, but claimed to glean this info from the FAQ. Even then, they're not outright stating that it possible but making their own deduction:
From this, you can deduce [emphasis theirs] that it's possible to boot Free BeOS 5 from bootloaders besides the Windows beos.com loader, which most likely means either a boot floppy or the standard BeOS boot loader.
If you have some other documentation, please quote or link to it. For now, I think the jury is still out...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
According to the Free Be FAQ, yes you will need Windows:
Q: Will I be able to install BeOS 5 Free Version within operating systems other than Windows?
A:Not at this time.
For more info, check out this story from BeNews.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
As much as I hate to say this, but it looks like MacOS X will be the best chance to get quality midi apps ported over to Linux.
I run a forum for professional musicians, and even within the professional community their is a large outcry for systems other than Windows / Mac.
Windows just suck for a musician as most have little understanding to make these systems stable (it can be done, but ya gotta buy quality components...none of this SoundBlaster shit works for a Professional...the latency is just unacceptable).
Macs are way too expensive, though this is what a good deal of Professionals use (don't tell me that all the musicians you know use windows unless you can supply statistics for their sales...) but even these guys hate fronting for a system that has half the MHz at 2x the price even if they can get their work done far faster (MHz ain't everything folks).
Steinberg is now supporting Be which might be a nice platform for Midi/Multimedia other than the fact it is a closed system and as such has no chance of ever competing with Win/Mac as they've already got the userbase.
Hell, Linux sems the perfect way to go. I've often wished that Hardware Synth manufactures would stop creating proprietary chips and use off the shelf Intel/PPC stuff and build linux systems with extremely low latency. Linux would be perfect for Midi / Softsynth because one could make a distribution that kills anything that is a performace hog and simply does Midi / Audio. Shit, one could even make an embeded version of this for complete stability...
In the meantime, it looks like MacOS X will be the savior for Midi on Linux. As soon as a good deal of people start using this system, companies would be able to port crap over to Linux rather easily. I wouldn't even be supprised if the Linux version was the Prefered platform, with the Mac versions being their for ease of use purposes (If a musician can't stabilize Win, then he's not going to be able to configure Linux...then again I know too many geeks that 'claim' not to be able to stablize apps on Win as well).
hmm...enough hypothesizing...I need to get up and awake. Ya know someone is a geek when the first thing they do is to reach for their laptop before even getting outta bed.
clif
I've tried a few different audio programs under VMware, and had them either (a) crash on load, or (b) be amazingly slow because VMware is an incredible resource hog.
I've had very good luck running Buzz under WINE, though (use the native comctl32.dll, if you can), with almost-native performance (within 5% CPU usage), so it might be worth giving some other audio apps a try. I haven't done so myself, though. Well, except for Rebirth, which promptly crashed....
<plug>
There's an effort to make a very Buzz-like OSS audio app called OCTAL which needs all the help it (we) can get. So if you're interested, check it out and let us know if you can help out. Thanks!
</plug>
MPEG 4 Structured Audio is a good base language for building music apps -- our web page has an online tutorial about the standard, and a MP4-SA to C translator that produces runtimes that can work in real-time. It's a "meta-answer" to the Ask Slashdot question; it's probably not going to help today, but I think its the right techology for Linux to build on.
Jan Nieuwenhuizen's already made many intelligent comments on MIDI and its relation to notation software, so I won't retread what he's already mentioned...
But yeah - Lilypond is an excellent package -- I say this just as a user, not an author.
If it weren't an excellent package I wouldn't have started writing Denemo to be a GUI frontend to it. http://denemo.sourceforge.net/, as Jan's been mentioning. Any of you interested in music notation are encouraged to download it, to play with it, and contribute!
As for the comments on Rosegarden and kooBase/Brahms - I don't mean to start a flame war with Chris Cannam (Rosegarden) or Jan Wuerthner (Brahms), but at this point Denemo's at least as complete an environment for doing music notation, though it's not a sequencer. (Nor is it intended ever to be one, though anybody's more than welcome to adapt it for use as the score editor for a larger sequencing package. It's an offer that I've already made to the GSeq folks, in fact, though I can't guarantee them much help if they decide to.)
Just one note on that 60 meg download...it will uncompress into 500 megs of "file space" for BeOS and its apps.
But yeah, I would definitely recommend BeOS, too, if you're into audio-intense computing. A lot of major players in the high-end of the audio production industry are porting their apps to BeOS. Have a look at Be's page to see who they are (b/c I have enough research to do already and I still need to go get my hair cut).
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
In a few, exceptional cases, it might be that you can't tell the difference between a quarter an a sixteenth note with rests. But in *most* cases there is a difference. (As a viola player, I can assure you that there is a difference between a whole note pizzicato, and a quarter note.) So why draw focus to the exeptional case where the generally expected possibility MIDI->notation would maybe not be problematic?
Also, you shot yourself in the foot, or at least prove that you've missed the point, when you say:
We were discussing the problems of MIDI->notation: `MIDI doesn't contain the information you need', and here you even introduce a new fictional one! For the case when you wouldn't have pizzicato strings (when would that be?), you suggest to introduce yet another inaccuracy to MIDI.Moderators, what am I missing here?
Jan
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Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org
Jan
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Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org
Later this month, BeOS Revision 5 will be released, free for non-commercial use. Details are sketchy, but it does sound like you will need to be running windows in order to use the free version. (Kinda like a UMSDOS Installation of linux.) Wait until later this month to make your decision, download Free Be, and try it out. (Will only be about a 60 meg download.) If you like it, you might consider buying the OS.
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linuxisgood:~$ man woman
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
I haven't done much searching recently, but I have jazz++ from Jazzware, and it works fairly well for hand sequencing. I couldn't get it to record, but I probably have an old version. Looking at the page now, it looks like they're going opensource.
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Seeing is believing; You wouldn't have seen it if you didn't believe it.
Pawn shops.
Also, look in the used equipment section of a Mars Music if you have one near you. Check classified ads also, and look around on the web (such as Harmony Central for used equipment. Unlike computer equipment, electronic music equipment that's even 10 years old can still be very useful, and even highly sought after. For example - if you can find somebody who's getting rid of a Yamaha DX7 for cheap, that's a hell of a find. Not a good synthesizer (FM sound), but a fantastic MIDI controller for other synths and soundcards and the thing just never breaks.
Look at prices on minidisc player/recorder decks, they are pretty cheap now. They're good for mastering on a budget, better than tape but not as good as DAT. Just be aware that Minidisc audio is compressed.
It all depends on what you want to do. It's harder to make a good *recording* studio on a budget than it is to make a decent MIDI-only setup on a budget. All you really need is maybe an SBLive value, and a keyboard with MIDI ports (preferably with velocity sensitivity.)
There are lots of good soundfonts available for free on The SBLive Site.
Trouble is, you'll need windows to use them... and some sequencing software.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
If you do audio and MIDI on a budget, it's hard to beat the SBLive Value for 59 bucks! :( :|
Unfortunately, if you really want to get into it, this ain't a very cheap hobby
Fortunately, getting paid for a couple of my projects went a long way towards paying for the more expensive gear. So for me it's more of an investment, even though I haven't actually turned a profit on it yet
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Under linux, right now the SBLive just plays sound, and the drivers are still pretty buggy.
On my windows box, I use two soundcards, a TB Pinnacle and a Live with digital I/O. I load approx. 50MB worth of soundfonts for some of my pieces (32MB of which can be used at any one time by the Live), as well as using the onboard effects, which I can route my external synths into via my mixer.
A MIDI sequencer under Linux just won't cut it for me.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Unfortunately, if you really want to get into it, this ain't a very cheap hobby :(
God, tell me about it. I've got a crappy P133 at the moment, Cubase VST 3.5 (not that my PC is anywhere near fast enough to use many audio channels, ugh), Rebirth v1.5 and a SB Live running W95. I did have access to my mate's stuff - a Roland TB303, Roland JP8000 and a Korg digital mixer, and now that I don't I've practically given up - there's no way I can afford the complete PC upgrade, a nice Event Gina, a Novation Supernova or any of the other nice toys I really need to get back into music :( My only choice at the moment would be a tracker - not really professional quality.
Word.
You mentioned softsynths. For some reason, I hadn't heard about this until just a while ago and I was pleasantly surprised... It's a Roland Juno 6 -softsynth, "Ultramaster Juno-6". It's the best softsynth I've seen for Linux. You can buzz and howl all you want with it, and it works today. Great stuff!
"I am 99% ready to completely wipe all Windows software from my machines, but the last 1% I need ..."
Umm, if you've got more than one computer, leave Windows into one of them if only for the sake of running Cubase or Logic Audio or whatever in it. Linux audio software isn't yet up to those of Windows, but they're slowly getting there.
Most of the audio software I've tried are in their very early stages of development. There are a couple of relatively decent MIDI packages around (such as Brahms, aka. "ex-koobase"), but for those of us dealing with samples, the situation does not seem so bright. Crashes and unexpected weirdness is not uncommon. But that's acceptable for software still in development!
However, there are a couple of real jewels (for the bedroom music enthusiast) emerging, mainly terminatorX and soundtracker. IMO they both need no-compromise stereo sample support (mono as of 3.55 and 0.3.10 respectively), and Soundtracker should get rid of that horrible "pitchbender" gizmo. and improve the sound quality instead... I like terminatorX because the user interface is very intuitive. You can just blast away and make music without having to conduct The Ceremony of Ye Olde Premeditated Scripting Of Obscure Syntax. I'm not a person who can spend one week thinking about some strange way to make the program put my inspiration into audio form. So the interface has to be wham, bam, thank you ma'am.
What Linux needs is a Gimp for audio. That would really be a killer app. Still, things are looking bright. Bump around the Sound and MIDI Software for Linux site and you'll not only see glimpses of the future but might come across some pleasant surprises to adopt as well!
There are actually quite a few things to evaluate,
.wav from my line in gives me pops and drops. Shielding on most home sound cards is awful. Linux doesn't have support for many of the multi
but many of them are more for sound experimentation and not straightforward music sequencing and recording, which is what you likely mean.
Note that my ideal sequencer is version 1 of Vision from OpCode, which I still have on a Mac Classic. Clone that, and the world will thank you.
Jazz++ is the best of the worst. It does audio tracks, and under linux offers most of the basic midi capability you need to write music. Lacking is decent support for MMC or MTC, and there is no concept of "subsequences", ala Vision, which to be fair, is not found on a lot of Windows sequencers either. No step recording either; though you can draw notes on the piano roll window. Jazz++ is what I currently use for all of my music.
Brahms looks like it might be good sometime, but not yet. GSeq lags even further behind.
Melys is one to watch also.
Muse promises some great features, but I haven't gotten it to run on my system yet.
Typesetting your music, you might look at Rosegarden and Lilypond; I haven't dealt with either.
As far as multitrack, SLab is pretty darn neat.
If you are up for the command line, ecasound would do.
Latency is certainly an issue. Even recording
input sound cards on the market for pro dtd recording, so beware.
Linux.com happens to be running this article on music creation software under Linux. It mentions projects such as gAlan, a project to create an application for electronic music generation, FreeBirth, an attempt at a ReBirth clone, SoundTracker, Brahms, a MIDI sequencer, and aRts, a analog synthesizer application.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
On the other hand, GNU Lilypond has a midi2ly utility which tries to do this. (Normally to use Lilypond you type the music in a LaTeX-like format). If you're happy with what automated midi typesetting can manage, then give this a try.
To see some Lilypond output, look at the Mutopia project (a sort of musical Gutenberg project).
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I'll be realistic here. I'd love to do all my MIDI under Linux but it has a long way to go in order to fully support the necessary hardware. Maybe things will be different in a couple years. Remember when everybody used Macintosh for music because the support wasn't there on Windows? My how things never change.
:)
BeOS shows promise-- we'll just have to wait and see on that one also.
As for now, if I were to use MIDI software under Linux, it would need to do the following (based on what my current CW Pro Audio setup does):
1) Multitrack audio with non-destructive effects assignable to each track
2) MIDI effects (arpeggiator, chord analyzer)
3) Patch lists, with soundfont support, and patch names for most synthesizers
4) SYSX bank capability-maybe Brahms does this. I have custom banks to load into my external synths (wavestation SR, Proteus MPS)
5) Joystick MIDI support for both of my soundcards. Maybe Linux support is already there for dedicated MIDI interfaces, like MOTU?
6) Soundfont support. I have a few hundred MB of soundfonts that I like to use. Getting general MIDI support with the Emu10K1 under Linux would be a start, although I don't use GM.
7) Audio scrubbing + editing + interfacing with a 3rd-party audio tool, like SoundForge
8) Emu10K1 effects support. Beyond just reverb, the effects engine is actually pretty powerful.
9) Software synthesizers like Reality which can also be used in the recording software.
I could probably list a few more, but you get the idea. For me at least, I'm at quite a bit less than "99%" ready to make the switch. Based on my requirements above, most of which only Windows currently fulfills, I'm perhaps 30% ready.
I wouldn't mind keeping windows a little bit longer, and still use it for games + music software. Then I can just start up an Exceed session whever I need me Linux fix
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Airwindows (my domain name) started as the name for my studio, and that is still very important to me. The studio is largely MIDI based, with synthesizers ranging from Kawai to Proteus to an Alesis drum module to an old Yamaha FM module for basses and weird FM noises ;) It all runs off an old Mac performa 410 (a very weak pizza-box Mac from the 68030 days).
There's a variety of interesting and peculiar programs to do odd MIDI things: a delay unit for MIDI messages, a chaotic-algorithm toy for generating multichannel weird 'space music', a wild but buggy 'do everything' tool called Megalomania that will cheerfully take particular keyboard ranges and echo them upwards in major thirds recursively through different instruments if asked (if it doesn't just freeze up first! ;) ). There's also a program I myself wrote (in REALbasic) that produces sysex messages to program the very weird and twisted Yamaha FB-01, for which there is no programmer except one for DOS and a couple of flaky, sub-Linux-polish, and very expensive 'professional tools'. But above all else, there is Musicshop. This is, I think, a little brother of the 'Vision' v.1 that somebody else mentioned. I'll take a minute to explain what this does- then I'll explain what it doesn't do, and what I'd give my eyeteeth for in a MIDI sequencer.
First and foremost, Musicshop is solid. I'm not talking 'interface feel' at all, I mean musically. It is capable of playing dense MIDI sequences on an 8 mhz 68000-based Mac Plus. It does _not_ hesitate, or drop notes- the rhythm does not lurch no matter what, even while you interact with it. It does this by taking over the Mac entirely, and placing note timing above all other things, including screen refresh. You'll often see it redrawing the screen poorly or not at all while it's busy playing the notes. On a faster machine it still lags in screen redraw or interface responsiveness due to this intentional decision to put Notes Uber Alles. I won't willingly settle for anything less from a sequencer if it's going to be driving synthesizers that I have to play music on, and play along with. It's damned unprofessional for a sequencer to make the music sound slightly drunken or fumbling, and this has always been a problem with underpowered Windows PCs running MIDI sequencing. Not Musicshop! MIDI _is_ hard realtime stuff and this must be understood first (unless the idea is to compose sequences and then get a mac plus for playing them solidly because it can do hard realtime by starving the OS of cycles completely?)
Tracks can be shown in musical notation, but I and I suspect many other synthesizer-tamers go for the music roll display, in which you're looking at basically colored lozenges showing the pitch, channel, on and off of each note. There is a trick Musicshop does to handle very short notes or notes that would extend less than three pixels on the screen at the current zoom level- it draws the note as an X, not a lozenge. This takes on great importance when using the Alesis's trigger inputs as a drum kit- the notes this produces are just about infinitely short at most zoom rates, and without code to draw them properly they will vanish and be impossible to manipulate.
Notes can be manipulated by the mouse in three distinct ways- pitch change, attack and note length. Clicking on a note sounds it and sets up one of these changes- on the middle of the note you get to slide it up and down in pitch (each new frequency sounds the note again), at the front of the note you get to change the start time, at the back of the note you can stretch it out for longer or shrink it down to make it more staccato, without affecting pitch or when the note was struck.
It's important to point out that this is not necessarily quantized, as MOD sequences are. Musicshop counts 480 units in a quarter note, or 1920 for a whole note. The note triggers can vary by as little as one unit, 'quantizing' the basically infinite-resolution timing of a live performance down to these 'units'. At 120bpm this is just barely perceptible- for instance, a seriously grooving performance on drum triggers will be faintly unfocused when reduced to 'units'. Sometimes I've run the sequencer at double or quadruple time to get more unit density- this works pretty well, actually.
This also means that you can program in sequences, such as a drum sequence, as quantized (to start out with a machinelike rigidity), copy or repeat them (another feature that's quite handy) and then go in and select all notes sounded by a particular drum (click on the border of the note field and you can select a horizontal line through the entire performance) and carefully move all the notes forward or backward in time in unit resolution- not note resolution. The reason to do this is to get _real_ 'live feel' rather than some dumb random inaccuracy feature. To make a hihat groove harder, sequence it with dynamic information (if size of dot is volume, you might have it like this: O...o..oO...o..oO...o..oO...o..o) and then take the soft hits and move them back in time just a touch, so they hesitate. Do the same with soft bassdrum hits, and take the snare backbeat and move it back until it feels like someone's arm swinging down to hit a drum- snare backbeat _needs_ to be shifted back in time from the quantized position in order to sound more relaxed and grooving, otherwise it doesn't even feel like a drum, it feels like a MOD. Once this is all done, nothing _feels_ 'hesitated'- instead, the bassdrum and hat feel like they are coming in with extra force and authority on top of the beat. (You also need to do this with bass and any other instruments being sequenced.) The reason not to push things _forward_ is because in Musicshop you get to compose music using multiple parts and it will happily let you sequence these live or sequenced parts as if it _was_ a MOD: you write a chorus, and then just stick it in each time you need one, saving time. If you need it all in one performance, export to standard MIDI and re-import. When you are using multiple parts it's a problem to move an attack _earlier_ than time zero of the sequence, so as a result you have to take all non-'pushed' notes and pull them back instead, to get a human feel. This also means the aggressively hit notes are mechanically perfect, making the overall groove more easy to sense.
Now, I've barely scratched the surface there- haven't touched on using the repeat paste to compose polyrhythms, or the spiffy little tuple algorithm they have, or various interface tweaks, or even the strip chart which I wanted to mention (alter durations or velocities etc. _graphically_). I'd love to go into more detail for anyone trying to make a serious Linux MIDI program, if anybody is, which I wonder. I wrote a REALbasic program to give sysex events but I am _so_ not qualified to write a sequencer in C, much less realtime kernel patches to make it actually useful. But I can explain what's needed for design and will spend any amount of effort to help such a project because I write free software too (GPLed, to be exact, and hindered by my inability to write actual C code).
One major feature that I really, really wish Musicshop had was more interesting ways of affecting selections of notes. For all I know recent versions of Vision have this, but Gibson bought out Opcode and basically dismantled it for no good reason, so Vision is pretty dead now through corporate idiocy, many programmers laid off. At any rate, I'd like to be able to sequence a bunch of notes, such as a snare drum fill- imagine a steady bass drum happening, then a 'chemical brothers' sort of fast snaredrum roll leading into the bass drum again. I'd like to be able to select all the snare hits and fade them in (something I can already do in Musicshop with the strip chart, easily), and then select them again and timeshift them only on one end of the selection, the alterations blending smoothly into the original timings like a gradient. By this I mean that I should be able to take a machinelike snare roll and with a few easy adjustments be able to make it go zzzZZZZWIP! into the bass drum, starting late but the notes happening faster so that it's like they accelerate into the bass drum. This is a _very_ common effect from live drummers with a sense of drama- it's the difference between a Steve Gadd and a Chad Wackerman, the sense of elastic time that dramatizes the steadiness of the underlying beat. Alternately I'd like to take a sequenced, robotic fill and stretch it _out_ so that it started out sounding totally offtempo, and then as you picked out a regularity it would converge on the existing beat. It takes a Bill Bruford to pull off something that weird on real drums, but it's an amazing effect. Currently the only way I can do it in Musicshop is by digging out the ol' calculator and writing it all out on paper in units- which is such a pain that some of these things I've never even attempted. I'd like to see a Linux MIDI sequencer that does _more_ than cakewalk-and-a-soundcard, that dares a little more- even one which relies only on some weird programming language, if necessary. The important thing is that it would need to actually understand what music is, and concepts like this elastic time concept that's so important to sequencing appealing, interesting, exciting music. The other important thing is that it would have to be realtime if it had any pretenses of being a professional tool.
From the GNOME and KDE homepages, I managed to find sequencer apps... actually from what I saw they were hoping to be whole "music suites." (I think the KDE one was hoping to be a re-write of Cubasis). Of course, like productivity software, the Windows/Mac versions have in some times a decades long development head start, and this shows (although it seems some OSS projects seems to catch up very quickly).
Sound librarians are far behind... there is a port of CSOUND to Linux (the top patch synthesizer), but this only synthesizes patches, I don't think it has a wave editor, nor do I think it can download patches from a keyboard.
Music notation software is even further behind. The Rosegarden project (now part of Gnome) had a notation part, but the whole thing is being rewritten from sratch for GNOME (hmpf - it needed to be rewritten, I understand, but what ever happened to platform idependence?)
Hope this helps, it was a while ago that I looked, so sorry for the lack of URLs... but maybe there's enough here that you can do a search.
Secondly, if you are familiar with NeXTSTEP and their fabulous MusicKit/SoundKit combo, I am (as soon as this term is over!) planning on porting it to GNUstep/Linux. So, all the powerful NeXT music and sound apps (like SynthBuilder) should be easily portable to Linux. See http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/CCRMA/Software/Music Kit/MusicKit.html#bg for background on all this.
I'm still wading through low-level MusicKit code (in addition to trying to keep my grades up!) and would appreciate some help, so write me at my email address!
For notation I use Rosegarden, then to listen there is timidity, kmidi, kmid, and I am sure are more. There is plugger as a plugin for midi and several other resources. So far I have not seen anything as grand as cakewalk, but I have not used cakewalk either so I do not know.
There is also jazz which recently became open source. Try http://www.jazzware.com/cgi-bin/Zope.cgi/jazzware/ for jazz and see if it suites your needs. Between Rosegarden and Jazz I think you will find a good package.
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Check out the Sound & MIDI Software For Linux page at http://www.bright.net/~dlphilp/linuxsoun d/ Woogie
LilyPond also features MIDI output and comes with a separate program (midi2ly) for converting MIDI to LilyPond's input language. However, trying to convert MIDI to sheet music is a rather useless undertaking, IME. Rich MIDI lacks lots of notation features, such as accents, ties (as opposed to a note of double length), chords vs. voices, clefs, grouping into staffs (two voices on one staff, or each on its own), voices that switch staffs, beaming, arpeggios (vs quickly played notes) grace notes and ornaments in general, flageolets, fingering, enharmonics. So, if you want a real nice score, you'll have to edit the resulting score by hand, anyway. It is this editing that takes most of the time, not the entry of plain notes (that is, if you can touch type).
As a separate project, work is underway to build a GUI (GTK+) frontend to LilyPond. Check out Denemo: denemo.sourceforge.net. Still in its early stages, but already usable.
RoseGarden is basically an orphaned project. To quote Elliot Lee: "It isn't going anywhere any time soon." The last post on the Rosegarden mailing list is dated december, 6 1999. There are 2 branches. The first one is the X11 program, and hasn't changed much since the time Han-Wen named LilyPond as a pun on Rosegarden three years ago. They are also doing a complete ground-up rewrite of the package (slated to be 3.0), using Client/Server architecture, CORBA, GUILE, C++ and GTK. This all means that noone is working on the usable 2.x sources, and 3.x doesn't even compile. 2.x doesn't have any LilyPond support, but it is planned for 3.x
Jan.
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Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org
As the old name suggests, it is a MIDI sequencer in the style of Cubase.
It is looking very promising, but at the time I last used it (a few months ago - so I may be out of date) it wasn't ready to replace Cubase.