[TriLUG] Musical composition software

[Michael Thompson]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/

^there you will find a custom Fedora distro, complete with low latency
patched kernels and RPMs of *many* music programs, all installable with
apt.  Its FC1 (I *think* much of it has been built for FC2 as well), but
if you want an easy way to do most things musical with Linux, this is
the easiest way IMHO.

If you're doing multitrack recording of live instruments or voice, I'd
try Ardour, RoseGarden looks very nice, but the last time I tried it, it
was very unstable.  RG seems to be a great choice for MIDI tracks
though, and it can be interfaced with Ardour.  :D

I'd also recommend trying out Jack.  Jack is like a patch bay that all
your Jack enabled software can interface with so you can route the audio
in/out and time sync your audio programs.  I was able to use Qsynth as a
midi sound font source for my external midi controller and route its
output through Jack directly into Ardour (mostly drums and piano), then
record live guitar/vocals/etc on other tracks to be mixed down.  It was
pretty cool, although I'd save often, some of these programs are still
in their early stages it seems...

If this sounds confusing, dont feel bad.  I'm still a n00b re: linux
audio so my explanations are probably not very clear.  ;-)

Bottom line, CCRMA makes building a Linux Music Workstation very easy.
Just install FC1, apt, change your sources.list to the CCRMA
repositories and apt-get install your music programs.

One more thing, I've heard that the Jack application *can* be a possible
security risk, dunno how but thats what I've been told.  Regardless its
a good app and you might want to consider keeping your audio workstation
off your network anyway, as I've heard that any extra hardware in your
box will do nothing but increase latency and possibly create more noise.
~ I just shut down my network service when its not in use, but a USB
network device that can be completely removed might be nice.

I'm by no means an expert, but if you have questions join us in #trilug
on freenode.net (irc) and if I'm there I'd be glad to supply what little
help I can.  :)  My nick is 'fatstrat' btw.

$.02

- --mike



Jeff Tickle wrote:

| The best I've used is Rosegarden.  I wouldn't say it's on par with
| Finale (Windows), but it's not bad, although just now looking at the
| website it seems they've worked on it a lot since I last used it.  I've
| heard a lot about MuseScore, but it needs some sort of real time
| something or other in the kernel that I never could get to work.  As far
| as just typesetting goes, Lilypond is AWESOME... it's sort of like a
| music programming language.
|
| Links:
| http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
| http://mscore.sourceforge.net/
| http://lilypond.org/web/
|
| Please share if you find anything else... I have brief stints of musical
| brilliance and the lack of Finale for Linux unfortunately makes it
| rather painful.
|
| -Jeff
|
| On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 02:00 -0400, Matt Frye wrote:
|
|>Has anyone experience with musical composition software for Linux?
Exists?
|>
|>MP
|
| F
|


- --


Michael W. Thompson
Eastern Radiologists, Inc.
Information Technologies
Office:  252.754.5244
Direct:  252.931.7645



-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin)

iD8DBQFBf6KVuxlRkoWKZoMRAsrnAJ492K2TRM7o5DtKGC7/4ZZW4MMfkwCggGpp
O/F1PBdRWcs4E7t1zvocnRU=
=kkMj
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----