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Rosegarden 1.0 Released
bonch writes "Rosegarden 1.0 has been released for Linux. From the website: 'Rosegarden is one of the most comprehensive Linux music software projects, and is the only Linux application to offer full composition and recording capabilities to musicians who prefer to use classical notation.' Rosegarden is free software under the GPL. Take a tour or find a package for your distro."
There have been lots of exciting developments in OSS music software in the past year or two.
Congratulations to the developers!
Rosegarden in conjuntion with jack, ladspa, ardour and a lot of other packages are getting to the point where profesional audio in linux comes closer to a reality.
I know that it has still a way to go to be at the level of other platforms, but the gap is closing. It is already posible to work in audio with linux.
-- EOF
If I imagine a noise and manipulate the controls of Rosegarden expertly, will I get the noise that I'm looking for?
To be able to do that, you'll probably want something like a modular softsynth. For Linux, there's ams. That combined with a virtual keyboard like vkeybd is enough (given the "expert manipulation" part). Something like Rosegarden could then act as the "player" of the synth (which is like the "instrument").
If you really want to get down to the bits and bytes, there's pd.
The easy road to all this is to install the AGNULA Linux disribution, which comes with a shitload of software.
For those of you interested in an multimedia distribution, I would recommend checking planet ccrmma (pronounced karma) http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software /
It is RedHat/Fedora centric, but it made me shitch from Debian for the multimedia workstation.
Works great with apt too!!
-- EOF
ardour is another good free recorder (ardour looks more like protools than cubase)
ardour
Studio to go. You don't have to line up any ducks, the ducks come pre-lined up.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
For example, I have a Creative SBLive! card which is supported. I load a patchset using the asfxload utility, and my hardware synth can be accessed at MIDI port 65:0. I also have Timidity+ installed, and it's found at port 128:0. And finally, I have an external MIDI keyboard (an old Yamaha PSR-300) which is connected via a gameport to MIDI adapter cable to the SBLive!. The external keyboard is at port 64:0.
Using ALSA's "pmidi" command, I can spool a midi file to any of these devices, so I can actually make the Yamaha play the file externally. I haven't checked out the latest Rosegarden yet, but if it supports ALSA now, then it should be able to output to any of these devices. Old versions only supported the old linux OSS device /dev/sequencer, or you could output a midi file and play it however works best for you. Supposedly you can also capture MIDI and WAV data from external keyboards and other sources but I haven't figured that out yet.
Rosegarden is very cool if you have ALSA sound. I use it to write sheet music scores for my drums, bass, and synth tracks. Then I play the midi file and jam along with my electric guitar which runs into the soundcard through an amp simulator on the line in port. The computer mixes the output together and sounds great. The amp simulator (Zoom 503) basically makes my guitar sound like its being miked from an overdriven Marshall stack and that way I don't have to have a bunch of effects pedals daisy chained together to get a decent sound from the guitar. There are newer amp simulators like the PoD units that are also ideal for running a guitar directly into a soundcard.
Yes, you too can be just like Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, making weird music in your own home all by yourself with a Linux computer, Rosegarden, and some rather inexpensive equipment.
Another really cool music creation program to check out is Cecilia. It is a pretty technically oriented synthesizer package which can make some really weird sounds: think Pink Floyd. I haven't figured out how to really use it in combination with Rosegarden yet, but its a blast to play around with it and make strange sounds. Cecilia is pretty crashy and hasn't been updated in a while, but it's still a very nifty toy to fool around with.
Clickety Click
Hey buddy, he never promised you a Rosegarden. /ducks
Breakfast served all day!
AGNULA is a Linux distribution preconfigured for audio, with everything you mentioned plus a lot more ready to go.
A couple of large soundfonts are here at this site: PersonalCopy.
These fonts suck up a ridiculous amount of RAM, like 500M or so, so use the ones from your CD if possible (I bought my card second hand so I had to scrounge around).
Honestly, the SBLive (emu101k) is probably the best supported modern sound card available for Linux. When you compile your kernel for ALSA, just check all the MIDI options and build them all as modules. In this case its better to make modules which you don't know what they are than to not make them.
If you are using some distro with a canned kernel, then try running "alsaconfig" which should set up the modules automatically. ALSA used to be a huge pain to set up but in the last year or so there have been some big improvements since it is now the default sound system for Linux and OSS has been declared obsolescent.
To test it out, use the "pmidi" command. For example:
pmidi -p 65:0 myfile.mid
If you don't hear anything then either your mixer has the "music" slider muted, you haven't loaded the right kernel modules, or you haven't loaded a soundfont. Once it is all set up its pretty sweet.
BTW, the OPL3 is just the (Adlib) FM synthesis chip, it doesn't have anything to do with MIDI for the most part.
Clickety Click
Yeah, the QT and KDE dependencies kind of suck, but what are you gonna do. I run Gentoo with Gnome, but there are a couple of programs that I use that require QT and there is just no getting around it. QCad and LyX come to mind. I was really bitching to myself about LyX depending on QT until I read somewhere on the net that LyX's author is the founder of KDE! Oops hehe. On Gentoo, compiling QT takes a couple of hours on my AthlonXP 2400+, but such is life. You can bet I don't upgrade that puppy very often.
By the way, for those interested, here is a MIDI file that I wrote using Rosegarden a while back that I am using in my game project Space Commander
My Rosegarden creation: commander.mid. For some reason the Verizon server seems buggy and doesn't serve the file properly in FireFox, but I was able to download it using "wget http://mysite.verizon.net/b.d.hilton/commander.mid ". My Netwinder webserver is down right now so all I have is the Verizon webspace to post stuff.
Yeah, I like the sawtooth instrument. So what, I'm a rock'n'roller d00d.
Clickety Click
I have been using Cubase and other sequencers for since 1997 and I think that the Rosegarden project is great thus far, but IMO they will not gain many users until they support VST and or other software synths and effects. It can be done as Muse Research has produced a Linux based VST rack hardware device. Here's the link: http://www.museresearch.com/ Also check out http://bloodshed.net/wired/ another Linux based sequencer.
I'd imagine that audio is a difficult area to port because most audio apps depend heavily on standards not implemented in linux. ALSA is not nearly as low-latency as ASIO. Professional audio interfaces (think Creamware and MOTU, not Audigy) are quite often too obscure to have drivers for Linux. There is no true VST (and certainly no DXi) implementation available, so you immediately lose access to a vast majority of the software plugins available on the market today. I think we'll eventually get there, but building compatibility for existing standards will certainly expedite that process.
There's a lot of history behind the Rosegarden developers choice of Qt and KDE. The original Rosegarden dates from the early 1990's, when free toolkits for X GUI development were limited to pretty much nothing but Athena. Rosegarden managed to look good, which was a remarkable acheivement for any application written with the Athena toolkit.
In the late 1990's, the original Rosegarden developers wanted to do a ground up rewrite using a modern GUI toolkit. One of the main developers is very keen on OOP, so C++ was the obvious choice for the implementation. This was attempted using bits of the then nascent GNOME platform, but got bogged down because the GTK+ binding for C++ was not up to scratch.
The dissatisfaction with the GTK+ bindings for C++ lead to the current incarnation of Rosegarden, which uses Qt and KDE. The Rosegarden developers have commented a number of times that using the Qt/KDE framework has saved them having to reinvent the wheel on a number of occasions.
GNOME is my preferred desktop, and GTK+ is my preferred toolkit for GUI development. However, I'm more than happy to install the base KDE libraries to run Rosegarden, as nothing else can touch it for sequencing on Linux.
Well, actually, I think that one of the main issues in linux audio is the quality of the drivers for the soundcards. Even if most of the basic functionnalities of the soundcards are supported today, which allow people to play mp3s and watch movies on linux, the advanced functionnalities often don't work. Maybe any of you could give me their advice on which soundcard is fully supported under linux? Take care, the alsa database at http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/ doesn't give too much details on the advanced features of the soundcards like :"does the front panel of a soundblaster extigy 2 ZS platinum work?" or "can I plug an external midi keyboard on my soundcard?"
Thanks for your replies