On Tuesday, October 20, 2009, jimmy wrote: > --- On Mon, 10/19/09, David Henningsson: > > Out of curiosity, you mentioned aplaymidi before. Do you > > play the song via aplaymidi and alsa-seq drivers, or do you > > supply the midi file to fluidsynth on the command line? > > Short answer: for this test, I use aplaymidi to send midi events via > alsa-seq to fluidsynth, which sends audio to jackd to the hardware driver. > Later I can look into having audio effect plugins (i.e. jack-rack), have > tried it, but don't use sound effects much yet. > > Round-about answer, it depends on what I feature(s) want to use. I'm just > trying different things with different apps. > > I used to use Kmid, but no one ported it to Qt4/Kde4 yet, not sure how long > before it would be called an orphan.
I'm already starting the adoption process. > If I find time to practice playing the midi keyboard, I would like to play > (practice) along with some midi file(s). With a separate app, I can use it > to send the midi event to "virtual midi port" and not having to worry about > the various midi-port number/name changes. Patchage, or various other > conneciton saving apps haven't wow'ed me yet. > > Sometimes I want to pick up a sequence of fast notes, for keyboard or > guitar practice, tempo control allows me to slow things down. > > I want to be able to eventually play live on a midi keyboard, having the > PC/laptop as a decent sound module and arranger keyboard functions (live > rhythm machine with chord change cappability for accompaniments, with maybe > a couple of separate PC-keyboards for the arranger function controls). > Most of the hardware arranger keyboards and rhythms machines have very > limited user interface, to me at least. > > Generally for computer stuff, I prefer the Unix approach of using the best > tool for each task rather than a monolithic app, only run the tasks I need > and each of those can be changed or switched out for something better > without too much difficulties. Most of the time monolithic apps are > resource hogs and slow, it would be worse if you don't like some part of > it. Users don't use all the feautures all the time anyway. I cringe > everytime I bring up RoseGarden, especially on some older laptops, or even > older desktops. > > For midi's with lyrics, I like Kmid's ability to display midi text/lyrics, > tempo change, transpose, keyboard note display. Timidity lyrics display > sucks, only one interface allows decent control for skiping > forward/backward, tempo change, transpose, while note display maybe just in > win32... PyKaraoke is good at lyrics display but doesn't have any other > controls I want from time to time like tempo change, transpose... > > Rosegarden doesn't show lyrics, it does display notes for each midi channel > in realtime pretty well. It allows lasso-select from the mouse to play the > selected notes as each note (or a bunch of notes) got selected. > > Also use Timidity from time to time, it used to have an annoying "clicking" > problem with some soundfonts, which has been fixed in recent code change > (last few months to a year I think). It was about some release parameters, > or looping ability of the sample, if I remember that right. > > It may be nice to have all of those feature(s) in one huge app, but then > the UI might suffer, or I may not like how it may be presented, or the > logical flow sequence... Also, for large apps like Rosegarden, or even > Fluidsynth, it is a pitty task to try to revamp, refactor, or add new > functions. No pun intended, just a fact of life. KMid is about 10 years old. It is time for a revamp. My plans for it are: * Remove the deprecated OSS /dev/sequencer interface support. It has been dropped from OSSv4, anyway. * A fair ALSA sequencer implementation: don't create/destroy the client and port instances on each play/pause/stop action. This would allow the usage of KMid with a MIDI patchbay application like qjackctl. * MIDI Output implemented on pluggable backends. First one will be the ALSA sequencer backend, but I would like to develop win32 and Mac native backends some day. Also, a multiplatform backend based on libfluidsynth would be interesting for casual users, needing only to configure a SF2 file and the audio output. Some new features would be needed in libfluidsynth to create this backend, for instance: parse and process the lyric and text SMF events. Regards, Pedro _______________________________________________ fluid-dev mailing list fluid-dev@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-dev
