My old MPC2000 (non-XL) is starting to act oddly, and it has got me
thinking about whether I should even continue depending on the Akai
hardware, which generates rock solid sequencer time, but is eventually
going to be unmaintainable, and leave me with a lot of sequences and
sample libraries in various odd proprietary formats.
So while I'm working on getting my MPC working again, I'm also checking
into the possibility of replacing its usefulness with a mixture of
Hydrogen, Jack, Linuxsampler, and Ardour. There are a few questions
though:
1) This is probably pretty basic, but...can you send each
drum/instrument in a Hydrogen kit out a different physical audio
output in Jack? My whole setup is very much based on physical
hardware -- a real mixer board, real rack effects, etc. I haven't
heard a Ladspa plugin yet that offered EQ that really satisfied me
much, and I'm used to being able to do EQ on my mixer from the 10
outputs of my MPC, individually, per track, and also using rack
effects from the effects loops and a real hardware patchbay. I could
keep doing that if I can send individual Hydrogen tracks out to audio
outputs on my RME Multiface. I could also add more outputs as
needed. It'd be ideal if you could just route individual tracks to
hardware outputs via Jack.
2) Hydrogen seems a lot like the Roland TR-series drum machines, based
on putting notes on "ticks" on a grid. I didn't see much mention of
free-form human feel drumming though. Is there a way to just not
quantize at all, and realize at least a standard 96 ticks per quarter
note type of resolution (or more)?
3) Also, all the discussion of entering rhythms in the documentation
seemed to involve using the QWERTY keyboard, which obviously isn't
going to be velocity-sensitive. Is there a way to have an outboard
synthesizer keyboard (or even better, my Simmons drumset with Roland
PM16 pad-to-midi) play or sequence Hydrogen patterns via midi, with
full velocity sensitivity? QWERTY keyboard is an awful way to have
to sequence.
4) If these are things that are beyond Hydrogen's abilities, would I be
better off trying to go through Muse or Rosegarden to achieve these
things? Or maybe just stick with hardware samplers for now? I'm
mostly attracted to the idea of doing sampling and sequencing on FOSS
software rather than on hardware samplers because the saved data
doesn't have orphanhood in its future that way.
Any ideas on how best to go about making Linux audio software replace an
Akai MPC?
--
+ Brent A. Busby + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin + banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago + eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. + Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute + we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky
_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-user mailing list
Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
