The Rosegarden MIDI Sequencer [LWN.net]

Rosegarden is a MIDI sequencer application for Linux that has been under development for a number of years. The Freshmeat listing shows the initial project registration on May, 1998. The project went through a branch/rewrite, the original version was renamed X11-Rosegarden and the new Qt-based version was named Rosegarden 4. The current project description states:

Rosegarden is a professional audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment. Rosegarden is an easy-to-learn, attractive application that runs on Linux, ideal for composers, musicians, music students, and small studio or home recording environments.

[Rosegarden] The Rosegarden online tour explains the capabilities of the software. Rosegarden features include:

A matrix editor for working with MIDI note events.
A notation editor for working with musical scores.
Musical notation can be exported to LilyPond for professional quality output.
Built-in capabilities for sequencing of audio clips.
An event editor for working with MIDI events.
Support for graphical editing of MIDI control changes.
Input from a remote MIDI keyboard, the computer keyboard or a mouse.
Output to MIDI devices and software synthesizers.
Support for the LADSPA audio processor plugin API.
Support for DSSI-compatible software synthesizers.
Support for ALSA-compatible MIDI software synthesizers.
Integration with the JACK Audio Connection Kit and associated tools.
An integrated audio mixer.
Unlimited undo/redo functionality.
Translations available for 14 languages.

Stable version 1.2.4 of Rosegarden was released this week, it is a bug-fix release: "The 1.2.4 release addresses several issues with the prior 1.2.3 feature release. 1.2.4 introduces no new application features."

The latest version of Rosegarden is available for download here, it is a good idea to review the minimum system requirements for hardware selection and supporting software before installing the software.

If you are looking for a capable MIDI sequencer, give Rosegarden a try.

(Log in to post comments)

The Rosegarden MIDI Sequencer

Posted Jul 22, 2006 22:08 UTC (Sat) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]

<runt>
While I can understand the lack of support for "problem" things like mp3 in linux, how is it possible that a modern linux distibution like (K)Ubuntu Dapper doesn't setup MIDI sound right?

I did made a basic music editor in windows many long years ago (for Windows 95, if I remember right) with MIDI playback and it wasn't that hard. I'm sure the same program would run on modern Windows system, because I used the standard multimedia Windows API.

How can it be a modern Linux hasn't got MIDI right after all this years??!!
</runt>

Conclusion, the program seems interesting, but I got no sound and have much more things to do than having to read all over alsa, jack, timidity and rosegarden to fix the system config.

The Rosegarden MIDI Sequencer

Posted Jul 23, 2006 1:51 UTC (Sun) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]

Well, ended reading what I didn't wanted to and found out I don't really need timidity/fluisynth or jack. All I needed was finding a sound font file and use asfxload on it (on my emu10k1 sound card).

I don't take nothing of my runt, though.