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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.
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.