marted?, 05 ottobre 2004 alle 13:37:57, Hans Fugal ha scritto: > Isn't it strange that there are perfectly usable sequencers built into > some keyboards utilizing only not-very-large LCD displays and the > keyboard, numeric keypad, some transport buttons, and a dial? Yet we > are faced with incredibly complex and heavyweight software to do the > same task. > > I too would love to see a simple, elegant ncurses sequencer. I'm > fascinated by the fact that there isn't one already; it seems a bit > idiosynchratic for linux. Hi, I think that the "sequencing experience" on GNU/linux is improving day by day: muse and rosegarden can be well compared with the commercial counterparts, and if you consider them as part of a more wide "music production" experience on linux, with all his great tools (jack, LADSPA, the upcoming LASH and the number of all other wonderful apps), you can even get a more powerful and flexible environment, in which you can model your setup with more freedom than you can in other platforms (not always as user friendly, but often very powerful). They're not perfect, for sure... but they are more and more stable and they gain new features very fast. Having said that, I agree that these sequencers suffer from a "do all in one place" vision, and I've dreamed too an "ecasound for MIDI" in which you can mix, record, assign to multiple outputs, filter, etc... multiple MIDI files and streams. I proposed this vision also on #lad (tapas knows ;), but unfortunately I'm no programmer at all :( so I can only share my dreams ;) If you like I can elaborate on that. For answering the original question, there are other sequencers available: seq24 [0], for example, is a very light and clean MIDI sequencer that with the addition of jack_transport abilities could be very interesting (and already is). I've used also jazz++ [1] for long time, and it has a very rich (if not the richer) MIDI feature set. unfortunately this is discontinued, but there are plans [2] to port it to gtk2. There is also sted2 [3] which has (I never used it that way) a ncurses version, but I found it a bit difficult to use, but feasable if you like "list editing". Another project that's somewhat related (but that's not a realtime sequencer) is mma [4], a MIDI arranger. > At the risk of overextending myself, I have considered embarking on > such a project. Please consider a command line tool "? la ecasound": this is a completely different paradigm than commercial/GUI sequencers but IMHO can offer a completely new (and creative) way of using MIDI (think for example of a library of chords and rythmic patterns that you can bind to a key), without having to struggle with a GUI... Sorry for the length and the malformed english :) Regards [0] http://www.filter24.org/seq24/ [1] http://www.jazzware.com/cgi-bin/Zope.cgi/jazzware/ [2] http://jazzplusplus.sourceforge.net/ [3] http://sted2.sourceforge.net/ [4] http://mypage.uniserve.ca/~bvdp/mma/mma.html -- Emiliano Grilli Linux user #209089 http://www.emillo.net
