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New MusE Release, A Step Toward The Linux Studio
spamatica writes "In these times when multimedia on Linux seems to be on a roll, it's my pleasure to break the news that one of the most powerful midi/audio sequencers on Linux, MusE, has just had a new release. This release is a major milestone featuring things such as Jack-transport and win32/VST-Instrument support. Moreover it has been much improved concerning usability, stability and functionality. The Linux-based studio is looming ever closer -- in fact, it's here!"
What's this Atari ST nonsense?
I still use Steinberg Pro-24 (the forerunner to Cubase) on an Atari ST. It is far more stable than any version of Cubase that I have used on a PC. I don't own a Mac, but I do hear that recent versions of Cubase have been rock solid on that operating system. So if I upgraded that would be they way I'd go. Then again by the time I can afford a decent Mac, Rosegarden (http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/) may have reached a stable release ...
As for the poster below who talks about booting from a 720Kb floppy, my ST has a SCSI hard drive, and boots in seconds.
Well, they're both audio and MIDI sequencers for Linux. They both support outboard MIDI gear, native Linux ALSA soft synths, and audio and transport synchronisation through JACK. Both look and feel somewhat like the big sequencers for other platforms. Both use Qt for their GUIs, though Rosegarden also uses the KDE libraries. I happen to think Rosegarden has the more polished GUI, but I'm biased (see disclaimer at bottom).
Both support arbitrary numbers of MIDI and audio tracks, with audio mixing and routing capabilities. Both support LADSPA effects plugins, of which there are hundreds available free. Both can (with some work!) be made to use VST effects through vstserver. MusE can host VST instruments with libfst using Wine; either of them can drive VST instruments hosted separately using jack_fst. None of these VST solutions is currently at all easy to configure and build, but see here for more information. Rosegarden is implementing the DSSI synth API and will probably ultimately use a DSSI wrapper for VST instruments. Rosegarden can also be run without audio support if you only want MIDI or score, whereas MusE always requires JACK.
My rather fuzzy impression of the difference in "feel" between them is that MusE feels like it came more from a studio/MIDI gearhead background, Rosegarden more from a composition background. MusE is a bit further ahead with things like instrument plugins, audio routing (send/returns etc) and automation. Rosegarden places a lot more emphasis on the score editor, whereas the one that used to be in MusE was actually removed completely for the 0.7 release.
Rosegarden is a somewhat bigger and more complicated program than MusE (c 200K lines of code vs 130K LOC), which you may see as good or bad depending on whether the extra code happens to do stuff you want or not. They're both written in C++, should you happen to care.
On the subject of soundcard support: the usual quick answer is "it's probably supported unless it's FireWire or made by MOTU". In particular the current M-Audio, Terratec and RME semi-pro gear mostly works fine, as well as most consumer cards. The lack of FireWire audio device support currently is a pain though. Anyway, see the ALSA soundcard matrix for detailed information.
(Disclaimer: I am a Rosegarden developer and, although I track MusE CVS, I have never actually managed to get MusE 0.7 to build because I don't have the right libraries and autotools. So do take all this with a pinch of salt.)