[Cialug] MIDI anyone?

[David Champion]

Matthew Nuzum wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 10:27 PM, Colin Burnett <cmlburnett at gmail.com 
> <mailto:cmlburnett at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     I've got a Yamaha P-85 & UX-16 and can play/record through ALSA with
>     aplaymidi and arecordmidi.  Not sure what's the next step.
>     http://linux-sound.org/ has a ton of stuff but a lot of out-dated
>     stuff.  I'm at kind of an information overload.
>
>     My immediate goal is to be able to use the P-85 as a controller for
>     software produced sounds through some software synth.  Any tips or
>     suggestions?
>
>
> I looked into this earlier this year and I found this is one of the 
> few areas where the OSS software is just no where even close to the 
> commercial software. Call it "consumer to mid-level professional audio 
> composition and playback."
>
> I downloaded the trial of Sequel 2 by Steinberg, which is an entry 
> level, consumer oriented tool and was blown away. Even on my son's 
> underpowered computer (relative to the suggested specs) it was doing 
> some pretty amazing stuff and my 8 year old was mixing tracks and 
> composing some (to him) cool music using the onscreen tools and our 
> USB keyboard.
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, and I'd be delighted to be wrong, but I 
> haven't seen anything like this in the OSS world, regardless of the 
> operating system. Maybe the Linux world has been hampered because of 
> our moving-target audio infrastructure (oss/alsa/pulseaudio)
>
> -- 
> Matthew Nuzum
> newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin, identi.ca <http://identi.ca> 
> and twitter

I think you're right... the OSS music software seems to be pretty far 
behind. I loaded about every piece of OSS synth / sequencer / tracker / 
composer software I could find in the Mandriva repo's, and didn't find 
too much that was either user friendly enough or functional enough to 
really use much.

There are plenty of packages that look similar enough to stuff I used on 
my Amiga in 1990, but it's nothing like what I've seen people using on 
Windows or Mac.

I'd be interested if anyone has suggestions on OSS software in this 
category, or a demo of how to use some of it. I'm guessing it's kind of 
like using GIMP - it does neat thing, but you have to learn the 
interface first.

Not that I need to revive another old hobby...

-dc