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#1 2009-11-29 04:49:46

uncholowapo
Member
From: US
Registered: 2009-03-29
Posts: 238

Help with setting up Rosegarden?

Hi, I am looking ino creating an open source music studio with my laptop to enter a state competition for my High School's TSA chapter. Problem is that I'm totally new to sound on linux. I have very limited experience in music making and the best I have done was create a beep in Acid Pro on my friends machine on Windows tongue. All jokes aside, I really need this to work. I have a Toshiba Satellite L45-S7409 with a Pentium Dual Core 1.47GHz with 1GB. I know it's not the best hardware and am hoping it can handle what I want to make since I have my idea already set.

Rosegarden came to mind because I saw it under a forum topic in the Feora Forums about making music and is currently the only one I know.

Any help would be very well appricated.

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#2 2009-11-29 19:52:03

1LordAnubis
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Registered: 2008-10-10
Posts: 253
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Re: Help with setting up Rosegarden?

I personally don't know much about sound on linux (other than random enhancements in audacity), or rosegarden, but I'm pretty sure you need to use JACK with rosegarden. Anyway, great avatar.

Oh yeah, I've also heard of ardour http://ardour.org/ but I don't know much about it, or what you're wanting. I think there is some other program called hydrogen which can make drum noises... A friend of mine synthesizes music solely from a program on their computer, but they were only able to do it in windows, guess I'll have to ask what its called again.


Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
-Benjamin Franklin
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-George Bernard Shaw

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#3 2009-11-30 04:15:11

drcouzelis
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From: Connecticut, USA
Registered: 2009-11-09
Posts: 4,092
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Re: Help with setting up Rosegarden?

I just started writing music in Arch Linux. I installed Timidity as a MIDI daemon and use seq24 to compose. I don't need JACK or anything else. I'd be happy to tell you more tomorrow about how I set it up.

Seq24 is a simple but powerful MIDI sequencer. I'm really liking it. smile

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#4 2009-11-30 05:53:03

ngoonee
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From: Between Thailand and Singapore
Registered: 2009-03-17
Posts: 7,354

Re: Help with setting up Rosegarden?

For a music studio I'm pretty sure you'd want Ardour with Jack. Rosegarden and the like for MIDI (ardour hasn't gotten MIDI support in stable version just yet), but for non-MIDI go with Ardour.

Hydrogen is for the drum kit. Effects you can do through a variety of software, perhaps SooperLooper?


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#5 2009-12-03 09:32:11

uncholowapo
Member
From: US
Registered: 2009-03-29
Posts: 238

Re: Help with setting up Rosegarden?

drcouzelis wrote:

I just started writing music in Arch Linux. I installed Timidity as a MIDI daemon and use seq24 to compose. I don't need JACK or anything else. I'd be happy to tell you more tomorrow about how I set it up.

Seq24 is a simple but powerful MIDI sequencer. I'm really liking it. smile

I'd love to read on your setup.

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#6 2009-12-03 13:04:07

drcouzelis
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From: Connecticut, USA
Registered: 2009-11-09
Posts: 4,092
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Re: Help with setting up Rosegarden?

Sure! I just threw together a wiki page for it.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Seq24

It really was that simple. Just install TiMidity++, install seq24, click a few settings, and read the instruction manual. Let me know if you have any other questions, especially in regards to working with MIDI files.

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#7 2009-12-03 14:22:15

owain
Member
Registered: 2009-08-24
Posts: 251

Re: Help with setting up Rosegarden?

A few packages I'd suggest installing, as well as Rosegarden/Ardour/Hydrogen/Jack, in order to have a decent bulk of stuff to play around with (some from AUR):

qjackctl - a very useful GUI for Jack, making it easy to play about with the settings.
patchage - a graphical point-and-click patchbay for controlling audio connections between applications in Jack, and also MIDI input and output.  Much more clear to use than the one provided in qjackctl.
zynaddsubfx - a quite versatile synthesiser
bristol - emulation of a whole load of vintage synths (launched from the command line with 'startBristol')
fluidsynth & qsynth - an alternative to timidity, with the ability to create numerous instruments in qsynth, each loaded with a different soundfont (google 'soundfonts' to find plenty of sources of these, from the good to the awful!).  Each instrument will appear separately in patchage.

Jack is a sound server designed for the needs of realtime audio work, and needs to be started (via qjackctl) before you launch any of these Jack-dependent programs.

Off-hand, the things I can remember about getting Jack running nicely are to add the following to /etc/security/limits.conf:

@audio          -       rtprio          99
@audio          -       nice           -19
@audio          -       memlock         unlimited

As long as you're in the audio group, this then lets Jack take priority over other processes when it needs to.

In qjackctl, in setup - settings, check 'realtime', leaving the rest of that column unchecked.  You probably will want the driver to be Alsa, make sure your input and output devices are selected correctly, maybe match the sample rate to your hardware, and then you'll need to play around with the frames/period setting.  This gives a fixed (and therefore predictible) latency, which you want to be as low as possible without causing 'xruns' (buffer over- and underruns), which will be flagged up in the messages window of qjackctl once you start the Jack server.  I'd suggest starting of with frames/periods=1024, and then see if you can get any lower.

Also, Rosegarden will complain about not having a high-resolution timer, due to the 300Hz kernel timer of the stock Arch kernel.  This really isn't accurate enough for MIDI in particular.  I think there's kernels in AUR which offer alternatives, but I just compiled a custom kernel, using pacbuilder to edit the PKGBUILD to give it a custom name (kernel26-custom), and only modifying one setting from the stock config, putting the kernel timer up to the 1000Hz maximum.  Using a custom name meant it didn't overwrite the stock kernel, and I could add it as an extra entry in grub.

Rosegarden can have MIDI outputs from individual tracks connected to external synths (zynaddsubfx or bristol), or plugins (try installing calf, whysynth and xsynthdssi from AUR, for instance).  You can record MIDI input from a controller, or input directly into Rosegarden either through notation or piano-roll interfaces.  You can record audio tracks as well, or route the various synth outputs into Ardour and record everything there instead.  Another thing that Jack enables is synchronising drum patterns in Hydrogen with whatever you've got in Rosegarden, and you can then record the two at once with Ardour.  Or, if you just want to use Hydrogen as another synth providing drum sounds, you can control it from a Rosegarden MIDI track.

Or, in short, just play around with it all!


Edit: if you've got pulseaudio installed, use 'pasuspender qjackctl' to stop it interfering with Jack.  There's enough to deal with here without also trying to get the two to play nicely together!

Last edited by owain (2009-12-03 14:27:21)

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