At the Sounding Edge: Music Notation Software For Linux (Linux Journal)

Posted Oct 27, 2005 8:36 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Hooking midi stuff up to programs has been dead easy for me. But maybe that's because I am coming from the 'experianced linux user' angle instead of a 'experianced music guy that uses windows' angle.

I have 2 audio cards, a el-cheapo midiman usb kerboard, and that's about it.

I plug the usb midi controller keyboard into my regular usb qwerty keyboard.

Then I run qjackctl, which is a gui interface for jackd sound server and related command line utilities.

I configure the jackd sound server to use which audio card I want, then I configure the latency I want, then I start it. As long as I use jack-aware applications everything works fine. For isntance if I start ams (alsa modular synth) it automaticly hooks into the jack interface. Then from qtjackctl I can hit 'connections' button or something like that (don't recall the actual button name right now) then I select the 'midi' tab, click on my keyboard, click on the ams input and hit 'connect'.

Works that way on most jack-aware programs. Some midi-related programs have to be configured to expose the input/outputs thru jack, but that's not to difficult usually. Rosegarden is one that I've had trouble with though.. but I prefer to use smaller programs and hook them together rather then use one big thing.

right now my favorite thing to do is start qsynth (a fluidsynth front end), pick a nice sound font, hook up my keryboard to that, turn off all the reverb/echo stuff for it then send the sound output to ams were I have some nice filters and ladspa plugins that I try to use to get a more 'realistic' large room effect out of my stereo.

Now I never used a 'real' midi plugin thru my card.. my audiophile 2496 should handle that fine, but I don't know if I have my Audigy configured to do that correctly. The Audigy has some midi proccessing features that are common to all sound blaster style stuff, but I don't use any of it.

I think that if I mucked around with just command line stuff or just with a single application trying to hook it up to my sound card's midi features, I'd have a much more hard time. A very hard time actually.