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#1 2009-07-26 13:32:12

atordo
Member
Registered: 2007-04-21
Posts: 147

Just looking for a "Fisher Price" piano

I'm just looking for a program which would:

- Emulate a piano keyboard in the PC.
- Be able to select an instrument from a soundbank.
- Just play it and make sound.
- In the rare event that something worthy arises, be able to save it as midi (or other more or less standard format).

So far I've been toying around with several pieces of software with varying degrees of success:

- LMMS. I actually managed to make a keyboard appear once. If I could only recall which one of the gazillion controls I right clicked... I'm afraid that if I had the time to learn this, I'd rather spend it learning a real instrument, a foreign language or taekwondo.

-Qtractor: Got lost, somewhere. See LMMS.

- Piano Booster. This one looks kind of fun if you have a real keyboard to plug to your computer (which I don't), but it's for playing an already recorded midi and it doesn't seem to allow free play. Also, don't forget to execute "fluidsynth -C0 -R0 -r22050 -l -o midi.alsa_seq.id=fs -a alsa -o audio.alsa.device=plughw:0 /usr/share/soundfonts/ns_piano/NS_Piano.sf2 /usr/share/soundfonts/fluidr3/FluidR3GM.SF2" or similar before if you need little details such as sound.

- Tuxguitar. Just had to install 162MB of dependencies with this one, but what would you expect, it works! Very nice program but I'm not interested in editing scores right now.

- Freewheling. Not exactly a traditional keyboard but seemed quite original and I wanted to give it a try. I even made a PKGBUILD for the current version, but after a ton of debug messages jackd couldn't connect with artsd or the resource was busy or something like that.

So, any suggestions for a simple keyboard before I install every sound application and his mother?

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#2 2009-07-26 22:00:07

Wintervenom
Member
Registered: 2008-08-20
Posts: 1,011

Re: Just looking for a "Fisher Price" piano

LMMS:  http://omploader.org/vMjFsY
Also, you can select a sample, put it in the song- or beat editor, then right-click on its track, and open piano roll.

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#3 2009-07-27 09:22:26

atordo
Member
Registered: 2007-04-21
Posts: 147

Re: Just looking for a "Fisher Price" piano

Your link just reads "Nothing to pee here", but thanks for the info. I'll try harder with LMMS if I can't find anything simpler.

Edit: typos.

Last edited by atordo (2009-07-27 09:23:13)

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#4 2009-07-27 11:17:26

Xyne
Administrator/PM
Registered: 2008-08-03
Posts: 6,963
Website

Re: Just looking for a "Fisher Price" piano

You don't need to know the ins and outs of LMMS to do what you've described.

On the left side of the screen in LMMS, there are several tabs with icons on them. The one at the top with a speaker will show you the instrument plugins. The Sf2 Player is a soundfont player. You can just drag that onto the Song-Editor window which should be up by default.

Click on the plugin in the Song-Editor to bring up the plugin's panel. It should be clear how to load a soundfont and how to select the bank and patch.

When the plugin's panel has focus,  you should be able to play notes with your keyboard (once you've selected a soundfont, bank and patch). If you want to record something, go back to the Song-Editor window and click on the note area to the right of the plugin. You'll see a little black box show up. Right click on that and select "piano-roll".

You can record live with the record button or edit and compose notes manually.

The star tab on the left side of the screen contains presets for the instrument plugins (the ZynAddSubFX has a lot of settings and was only recently included). Just drag and drop those onto the Song-Editor to play with those (left click on them to hear them first).

LMMS is simpler than it first appears and it doesn't take much tinkering to figure out most of the basics.


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#5 2009-07-27 12:28:21

Wintervenom
Member
Registered: 2008-08-20
Posts: 1,011

Re: Just looking for a "Fisher Price" piano

Ah, my link got some characters chopped off in the copy.  Anyway, on the left side, there is a tab called "Resource Editor," and you can select a sample in that and use it on the mini-piano that shows up at the bottom.

Last edited by Wintervenom (2009-08-03 13:47:58)

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#6 2009-07-27 16:54:15

atordo
Member
Registered: 2007-04-21
Posts: 147

Re: Just looking for a "Fisher Price" piano

Thank you both for the input. I was able to produce some noise following your instructions. I still think that LMMS is an overkill for my pathetic skills, though, but if nothing simpler arises I'll stick with it.

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