A samba I'm working on-- http://www.xscd.com/pub/music/audio/ogg/stephen-doonan_samba-1.ogg For this piece, I decided to do all the recording in Rosegarden. I first recorded a scratch (to throw away later) piano part to the metronome, to get the (minimal) arrangement down to guide me, then I recorded the percussion track, then the bass track and finally the piano track, all in MIDI. Then I used Rosegarden's MIDI mixer to balance the sound levels (to where they sounded good to me anyway :-), and had Rosegarden play back the MIDI to my external hardware tone generator (A Roland FantomXR is what I used for this recording), and recorded the resultant audio through an M-Audio Delta 1010 sound card back into the computer, through jack (qjackctl) and back into an audio track in Rosegarden. Then I exported the audo track as a .wav file, quit Rosegarden, opened the file in Audacity (I love Ardour and Jamin, but I wanted to limit myself this time, and Audacity is a fine application in its own right) and normalized the audio, then exported it as an OGG Vorbis file. I guess I could have just used the command-line programs normalize and oggenc instead. Then I tagged the OGG with easytag (nice program), with the Creative Commons attribution share-alike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ It's so much fun to create music, and so much fun to use the truly great tools available in Linux now. I wish I knew some local musicians (a drummer, bass player and maybe another instrumentalist like a guitarist or sax player, to form a small trio or quartet), but I don't (I live in a very rural area with not too many musicians to begin with and no way to make a living at it), so I just play all the parts myself as best I can. Steve -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others. -Edward Abbey ----------------------------------------------------------------
