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Sound configuration (arts+alsa+jack+synth)



From Rosegarden FAQ [1]:

   "Alsa? aRts? huh???"

I would like to use music editors like Rosegarden and it is very tough to configure the environment so it can play MIDI through soft synthesis. I could do it with "timidity -Oj -iA", but JACK is losing frames. I did not get fluidsynth/qsynth to work with Rosegarden.

[[ I do not know if I took the right steps, though: downloaded a soundfont from hammersound; installed fluidsynth and jackd*; killed arts; ran "jack -d alsa" and fluidsynth -m alsa_seq -a jack font.sf2; tried to play in Rosegarden; nothing ]]

I miss a utility that configure sound properly (all the environment, not only ALSA) and documentation about configuring all these together (arts+jack+alsa). I could not find any documentation about it in Debian Reference, although AFAIK Debian docs are being rewritten for the next release. The Linux Sound HOWTO [2] was last updated on 2001. Searching on Google [3,4] gives many maillist messages and most recent is from 2002. Many things I found are for older kernels (2.2 and 2.4).

When I tell aRts to use JACK, at KDE startup, aRts does not find JACK. I suppose I should call jackd at some place in KDE session start, before aRts.

In fact, my problem is: my adapter/driver (snd_intel8x0) accepts only one channel so I need to mix channels by software; also I want to use Rosegarden which needs synthesis. aRts seems the natural option since I use KDE (I guess I have no other choice besides arts and esd). Rosegarden site tells me that I need jack+{fluidsynth,timidity} and that I should prefer fluidsynth.

I'm using kernel 2.6.7 and I have used alsaconf to set up sound card.


[1] http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/resources/faq/#toc30
[2] http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Sound-HOWTO/
[3] http://www.google.com/search?q=sound+configuration+site%3Adebian.org
[4] http://www.google.com/search?q=debian+sound+configuration

--
Felipe



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