[Klug-general] Saturday 26th September Dover Meeting

[james morris]

On 20/9/2009, "Kevin Groves" <kgroves at ksoft-electrical-projects.co.uk>
wrote:

>yes I'm playing with a combination of Hydrogen, Rosegarden, Muse, Linux
>Media Studio (found today) and various Tracker apps. But I would like to
>see a good combination of hardware keyboards coupled up to the ideal
>software sequencer etc.

I don't really use sequencers for much more than creating loops which I
then cut-up the recorded sound of in ardour (usually). Seq24 and the
NON-sequencer are both worth looking at, the latter for something a
little different (both of these i like 'cos you can easily choose
chords and put notes into them and keep them in tune ;-)


>I've read that USB MIDI has moved on now and is in the base kernel. How
>viable is that?

USB MIDI is part of the ALSA driver (which is in the kernel). It's easy
to use. Unfortunately, the M-Audio Keystation MIDI controller keyboard I
have is bust ( the problem seems to be a flakey USB port ).

Using QjackCtl (a GUI frontend for JACK) the keyboard popped up in the
ALSA tab and can then be connected to soft synths/sequencers/etc from
there as well as in the sequencers.

I meant to mention also, that onboard sound cards are not recommended for
this kind of stuff, they usually have poor data-transfer rates, use the
CPU, and cheap re-sampling chips, etc.

I've got an M-Audio delta 66, (apparently lots of music technology
classes use these) which was not too expensive, lacks exciting features
designed to draw mainstream consumers, and is good for working with
demanding audio apps.

james