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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
In-Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 1998 17:06:51 -0600 (CST)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: MIDI anyone?
On 26-Oct-98 Paul Winkler wrote:
> No luck so far, at least as far as a good basic piano-roll-style MIDI
> recorder/sequencer; but I have found that Softwerk is absolutely
> fascinating!! All I had to do was set the environment variable MIDIIN to
> /dev/midi, and it works great; keyboard events can be used to trigger
> sequences, or short sequences can be step-recorded from the keyboard.
> There are many severe limitations but it's still a *really* fun thing to
> play with, and I haven't even explored nearly all of the possibilities
> yet.
That's one place where Linux seriously needs some help. Jazz is somewhat
useable, but it's not worth the $50 they want for it, especially considering
how cheap Cakewalk 8 for Windows is, and Cakewalk stomps anything on the Linux
platform to pieces.
There are two solutions to this problem. The first is to convince one of the
commercial vendors to create a Linux version of their product. I did that a few
months ago. I got varied responses from the different software companies.
Steinberg basically told me to screw off, that it wasn't possible. Cakewalk
gave me the 'no Linux version is planned at this time' speach, basically
meaning 'leave us alone'. Opcode gave me a fairly positive reply. They said
they'd seriously consider it if there was enough interest. I'm not sure if that
was the opinion of the company, or just the person I spoke with. From wha
t I understand, they're currently working with 4front Technologies to
make a driver for their multiport midi adaptors under Linux. Anyway, it wouldn't
hurt to make a request to them if your interested in seeing such a product on
Linux. Their website is, of course, http://www.opcode.com. You'll need to find
your way to the feedback page and make a product suggestion. You might also
want to give the other companies, especially Cakewalk and Emagic a request.
Maybe they've changed their minds about Linux. After all, Linux has changed
quite a bit since I spoke with them last.
The other option is to support the open source products that are in
development. There are currently two such products, Rosegarden and Gseq.
Rosegarden has intentions to rival and maybe even surpass the commercial
programs on Win/Mac. Their page is http://www.bath.ac.uk/~masjpf/rose.html.
You'll want to check out the development page. Gseq is a pretty straight
forward sequencer program in development. Their address is
http://personales.com/espana/madrid/gseq. If any of you are decent at writing
code, I'd encourage you to help out with these projects.
> One question, if anyone's listening: Does anyone know if there's a way
> to have a soft-synth (like RTSynth) receiving MIDI events on one
> channel, while another application listens on another channel? I can't
> figure out how to get anything other than "/dev/midi: device or resource
> busy". Is this do-able with OSS drivers (the commercial ones)?
I've been wanting to do the same thing for quite some time. I'd like to send
data from a sequencer program into Csound. I believe you can do it with the
commercial OSS driver, but I make no promises. Go to http://www.opensound.com
and ask the for yourself. I'd ask them, but I've already nagged them with so
many questions that I'm sure they don't want to hear from me anymore.
Hope that helps,
Jason
