On Friday 20 Jan 2006 03:59, Marcos Guglielmetti wrote: > At least, it would be nice that Rosegarden says something like "There > are no output MIDI Devices configured at all, so you will not hear > MIDI events until you ... bla bla bla
OK, this is a good example of the potential problems of the approach as well as of what it would be good to be able to do. In the case where you have no MIDI output ports at all, things are straightforward enough. But one of the things we have most trouble with is the situation where someone has a "hardware MIDI output" and gets no sound (i.e. has 64:0 with nothing connected to it, or worse has 64:0 and an emu10k at 65:0 with nothing set up on either). Going from there to successfully getting sound is actually quite tricky, because even if you go and start something like qsynth, it won't be the default connection. (We _could_ change the default connection semantics so as to prefer software synths, of course -- but then the problem is there's no reliable way to identify that something actually is a synth; at the moment we just look for "synth" in the ALSA client name (!) which is probably going to work for something like qsynth anyway, so long as it isn't properly i18n'ized.) Maybe the whole problem goes away if we simply pop up a list of the available MIDI outputs and ask which the user would like as default. Maybe it doesn't, because in the above case, none of the listed things will be suitable and we'll still have to find a way to advise them to go off and start qsynth instead. Another option would be to default to using synth plugins. The difficulty with this is that they don't behave quite comparably to MIDI outputs in ways that are tricky to deal with when importing existing MIDI files. In particular there's no very easy way to set up 16 of them as the outputs to your first 16 MIDI instruments (arguably that's another big limitation we should address separately). Or it could just suggest that the startup wizard needs the ability to select the default autoload file (MIDI outputs vs synth plugins)? I guess that won't work unless there actually is a synth plugin available that the user will want to use. Since we also have no way to load up 16 Fluidsynth plugins and then subsequently change the soundfont loaded in all of them at once, that looks like a dead end as well unless we actually bundle a soundfont (which we aren't going to do for obvious space reasons unless someone has a really nice 2MB GPL'd one to offer: we're back to the problem of how to get a decent "starter pack" GM synth or soundfont that's small enough to bundle, which we've looked at before but never got anywhere with). > With audio: "JACK is not running, so audio record/playback will be > disabled until you ... bla bla bla But then the question is, what's the "bla bla bla"? In contrast to the previous case, it's of course very easy to establish that JACK isn't running, but what should we suggest they do about it? I'm not trying to talk down the idea here, I must stress. I just mean that we could do with some sort of diagnostic flowchart to get started from, and then we can work up a way of implementing that, preferably flexibly enough that it's also easy to change later. And where there are big holes in the workable flow, then we need to work out separately how to plug those. Chris ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=103432&bid=230486&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list Rosegarden-devel@lists.sourceforge.net - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
