[TriLUG] Music Synthesis on Linux Mint

[Ken M]

SEQ24 should work well enough with AMS.  They both use ALSA Midi so no need to set up the a2jmidi bridge.  Jeremy Davis on this list has done more recently with SEQ24 than I have so he might be able to chime in on it.

As for general audio I notice you are using mint and reading the Ubuntu studio setup.  I can't say loud enough how great the KXStudio repos are.  Google and add those repos.  Particularly with Mint and Ubuntu base installs a big thing they fix is Pulse audio playing correctly with Jack.  If you go the KXstudio route I suggest this...

Uninstall jack now.
Add KXstudio PPA per their website.
Install cadence which is their own jack controller and will use jack 2 which is much preferred (especially on a multicore machine)

Oh course the usual places you would do an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade in adding a PPA.  Jack is just special because if you don't uninstall it first KXstudio will see the old Jack1 from  Mint as meeting the dependencies and not push Jack 2.  Again you really want to use Jack 2.

Side note, the early days the Oxygen controller was very non-standards compliant.  Sounds like you have already solved that or it is no longer an issue.  I would be interested how plug and play it was as the nightmare that was the oxygen 8 on linux still haunts me.

Other general tips, I can think of range from turning swappiness down to about 10, default mint/ubuntu/deb will have it set to 60.

And one last bit, although it is a different package you may want to check out Sunvox.  Sunvox is a tracker and modular synth that can load XI instruments all roled into one.  Less of a pure Unixy way to do it but it is a cool tracker and for extra bonus it has versions for pretty much every mobile platform you can name to work with it on the go.  I bought it for Android and IOS at different points.  Since you like modular synthesis and want to sequence it, well it might be worth looking at.  It is not as much of a pure modular as AMS but it is interesting.

Also I would recommend checking out Ingen which is a modular plugin host package.  Basically you can build a modular synth through LADSPA, DSSI, and LV2 plugins and route everything through Jack.

Again AMS is still the most pure modular synthesis option, just these other packages are interesting takes on a similar concept.

Ken

On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 02:12:17AM -0500, Paul Bennett wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've got a Linux Mint box that I'm trying to prep for use for me to
> noodle around with electronic music synthesis and sequencing.
> 
> I've started following the guide at
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuStudioPreparation
> 
> My hardware is an 8-core Intel 3770K with 32GB of RAM and a mixture of
> SSDs and HDDs. My MIDI devices are a Behringer CMD MM-1 and CMD DV-1,
> and an M-Audio Oxygen 49. My audio output is the HDMI audio on an
> Nvidia 780 GTX being fed into an Onkyo 7.1 amp.
> 
> What I think I probably want to do is get all set up so that the notes
> on the Oxygen feed into seq24 to do the sequencing, (along with some
> of the buttons) and then seq24 and the various knobs & sliders (and
> the rest of the buttons) would feed into Alsa Modular Synth to
> actually do the synthesis.
> 
> Up until this point, I've had great success with just controlling AMS
> with the MIDI devices, but it doesn't seem like a foregone conclusion
> that adding seq24 into the mix is going to be trivial.
> 
> Any additional hints, tips, tricks, or suggestions that aren't in the
> Ubuntu Studio guide? Questions, too, are welcome, if I have been
> overly vague on some points.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> --
> Paul W Bennett