On Friday 20 January 2006 14:57, Chris Cannam wrote:
> 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.
Yes it's true
> 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.
Mmmm.... so... at least it woud be fine that rosegarden names synths
such as qsynth with their "real" names, not "New Device"
> (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;
I didn't knew that (about the no realiable way)
> 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.)
Ok, I see. There must be a way...
> 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.
That's like cakewalk 6.0 or 9.0 (I only know these versions, but I think
that Sonar is doing the same thing). It's fine, maybe the best
troubleshoot.
> 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.
If he/she (oh, that remember me that there's no womans using these kind
of things) already has "hardware MIDI output", it would be nice to
display some information message about asfxload and soundfonts, or
something related, as Silvan wrote in another mail.
> 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).
stickler
> Or it could just suggest that the startup wizard needs the ability to
> select the default autoload file (MIDI outputs vs synth plugins)?
[1]
> 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).
[1]
That's a nice idea but, obvious, we will need an small and good GPL
soundfont to do that or: I'm thinking about zynaddsubfx: it could be
possible to make a General MIDI Bank with zynaddsubfx, but I dont know
if it supports program changes (i guess not), and the final sound will
not be realistic for acustic instruments such as Ac Pianos. So, qsynth
it's better for now.
Windows has it's own incorporated wave table GM instruments: you know
that they sound like a shit, but at least a sequencer under windows
will sound out of the box: not the same with all the GNU + Linux
distros.
It's debatable: many Windows users think that Cakewalk's sound is
horrible, but that's because of these Windows wave table instruments...
ok, I know that maybe they are not professional ones...
>
> > 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?
Ardour displays something about it, but in my first year using GNU+Linux
it was very incomprehensible to me... "what the hell is this JACK
stuff?, no, I will better use audacity!!!"
> 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
Great!
--
Marcos Guglielmetti (www.pc-musica.com.ar)
Coordinador del desarrollo de Musix GNU+Linux (www.musix.org.ar)
(www.musix.distrux.net)
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