Last Saturday 19 June 2004 18:28, Mark Wilson was like: > I don't have any sort of external MIDI equipment. > Just as the subj. line indicates, a fairly ordinary PC > setup, a few years out of date (Celeron 400MHz, 128 MB > RAM, ATI Rage 128 card and SoundBlaster 16 PCI card). I'm running a music system on a Celeron 600 + 192MB RAM and an onboard i810. It should be possible to do most things with this hardware, although you'll find yourself slightly underpowered when it comes to apps like Rosegarden4. > With this setup, all I can figure out how to do so far > is to use timidity to play MIDI files. ?I can use > Rosegarden to export my "scores" to a MIDI file, but I > don't know how set up a virtual sequencer, or what > /dev file to specify in Rosegarden's sequencer > configuration. When I try to put in /dev/midi, *midi0, > *sequencer, *audio, *dsp, *whatever, it tells me "no > such device" or unable to access or something. Rosegarden really needs JACK, which needs ALSA and you'll get best results with a kernel patched for low latency, realtime operation and all that. I use the AGNULA/DeMuDi packages, which more or less set themselves up, although you will need to tweak the settings for a low-spec system to make the most of what little resources you have. Think in terms of a digital 4-track and eight voice polyphony and no big delay-based effects patches. You may be able to figure how to do more with less as time goes on. You can use VKeybd for MIDI input. If you have a soundblaster you can load soundfonts onto the card with a utility like sfxload, which should save some vital memory. MIDI sequencing is probably the most complicated and resource hungry thing to get working, it's worth looking at MusE & seq24 as well as Rosegarden, they all have different strengths in this arena and you will have to fiddle around a bit to get the results you want. Other apps worth looking at for some quick, easy results are; Hydrogen - the nicest drum sequencer I've ever used, go easy on the LADSPA though ;) ecasound, command line multitracker. For softsynths, AmSynth, ZynAddSubFX (with the smallest oscillator size) and PureData. A brief skirmish through the tutorials of the latter will give you some idea of what your system is capable of. > But this is not just a Rosegarden question -- will I > be able to use any synthesizers or sequencers without > a "real" device to specify? ?Would the solution > involve symlinks, or named pipes, or other things I've > never yet explored? The best way is to use JACK with the qjackctl interface. Once you find the settings that work on your machine - you won't be able to use the lowest latencies, but again with a bit of experimentation, you should be able to achieve some good results. HTH & Have Fun. tim hall
