Re: rosegarden

["Herman Robak" <herman@skolelinux.no>]

On Sat, 23 Jan 2010 03:46:12 +0100, Nigel Barker <tech@hiroshima-is.ac.jp> wrote:

> Are any schools using rosegarden? I can't get any sound out of it,

Lest I waste our time on fruitless speculation:

What kind of sound?  WAV or MIDI?  Live sequencing or playing a score?
What kind of output?  Jack or ALSA?  A soft synthesizer, or a MIDI device?


Alas, Rosegarden as installed by a common Linux distro is not a turnkey
system in that regard.  I think the main obstruction is the notion that
the Jack audio system is "hard", "overkill" or "for professionals".
 Proper integration between Jack and the desktop environments has not
happened, as far as I can tell.  It's a pity, for many common media
applications integrate just fine with Jack.  But it's harder to set it
up "good enough" automatically, and Jack does not fail very gracefully.

Qjackctl and qsynth will overwhealm the newcomer.
An Italian teacher I know, Raffaella Traniello, uses a more primitive
softsynth in her classes.  When I described the Rosegarden->qjackctl->
qsynth workflow she was pretty clear that it would not fly.


> and google is suggesting that I need to recompilea low-latency kernel. Is that really the case?

Only for rock-solid performance, or if your hardware is barely
fast enough.  If your CPU is beyond 1GHz, and you can endure the
occational skipping, don't bother.  Unless it's used for live
performances or recordings, of course.

By the way: Is someone out there providing low latency
i686 kernel images built and packaged for Debian Lenny?
Someone dependable, with an apt repository, I mean.
Pretty please... :-}

--
Herman Robak