Re: rosegarden4 no sound SOLVED

[Seeker5528 <seeker5528@comcast.net>]

On Fri, 28 Oct 2005 21:45:44 -0700
"David E. Fox" <dfox@m206-157.dsl.tsoft.com> wrote:

> Playing with alsamixer/kmix etc. does not seem to help, as now playign
> a wav file - or playing back wav content I just record plays some
> horrendous noise instead of the desired result. mp3 files are playing
> fine, and I have amarok loaded now. Still, I might have bollixed up
> something temporarily as that normally has always worked fine. But for
> some reason or other, the sliders in alsamixer & kmix aren't always
> connected to the intended ones, and that's something I've noticed now
> for sometime. Instead of for intance raising the volume with Master or
> PCM, wave surround is the one I use. Could (possibly) the cables be
> plugged in wrong? I dunno, and haven't really looked, to tell you the
> truth. I've just managed to get used to it :).

I'm not a big fan of KDE in general, but kmix seems to be the best
mixer right now. The seperation of stuff into the input, output, and
switches tabs is nice.

I don't do a lot of recording. The main things that seem to be factors
is muting or disabling non used stuff in  particualr iec958 stuff for
the optical in coaxial interfaces. Then there is the mic boost, which
seems best muted and capture volume which seems best set to %10 or less
in volume. The volumes on the input tab are a factor as well as on the
output tab. I don't have kmix on the computer I'm on at the moment, but
there is a slider on the input tab I believe labeled as wave that
corresponds to the pcm volume on the output tab. If the stuff on the
input tab is set low then that limits the volume you get even if the
stuff on the output tab is all the way up. 

I don't think it is generally an issue, but at least with MythTV
using a TV card where you have to plug the audio output from the TV
card to the line in on the sound card the line in needs to be muted
or you end up with this wierd echo effect. With other software it
would need to be unmuted or else you won't hear what is going on
while you are recording.
  
> In truth, I'm a newbie when it comes to sound fonts and midi playback,
> since I've only sparingly played with it. Apps like rosegarden make it
> worthwhile to try again to get it working :). One thing - if I load a
> sound font (maybe a big one?) does it hamper the sound card - so at
> some point I would have to unload it in order to use other things, or
> can I just keep it there?

My dealings with midi is pretty limited I have a few tens of MBs of
midi files that I listen to once in a while often with months in
between. 

Since the soundfonts are loaded in the system ram I think the amount of
ram  you have is a bigger factor than the card it's self. When you are
not doing midi stuff other audio related functions of the card should
not be affected, so unless you want to free up ram for some other task
I don't see a reason to unload the soundfont. 

I have 512 MB of RAM and the soundfont I normally use (JClive21)
weighs in at 50 MB and I don't really notice any significant impact
from leaving it loaded all the time. 

I don't know what the limitation on the size of the soundfont is for the
Linux stuff, but the one really big soundfont I have (Fluid R3) includes
this note:

" 2.  I've included 2 files as you can see. The first one is the core
of the bank and has all the GM instruments along side with the GS
instruments that are recycled and reprogrammed versions of the GM
presets.  The second 3 meg file will give you full GS+SFX kit
compatibility should you choose to utilize it. The reason I broke it up
into two files is because the Live! has a 142 meg limit for loading a
font at one time, therefore this was the most logical thing to do." 

I have not tried Fluid with my Live card just because of the size issue
and figuring out what I need to do with the second file, but for
timidity there is a configuration file for Fluid at:

http://timidity.s11.xrea.com/files/readme_cfgp.htm

: along with some examples for your timidity.cfg file. 

I have tried a few other soundfonts in the 60 to 80 MB range and the
difference in impact on the system doesn't seem to be all that
noticeable. As far as how they sound bigger is not always better and
sometimes it's actually worse. 

> > The README.Debian file in /usr/share/awesfx tells you how to load a
> > soundfont and how to make it load automatically when the
> > snd_emu10k1_synth is loaded.
> 
> OK then. Getting that working too. I found a font site on the net and
> thus have a followup file - how to convert sfpack to sf2?

The company that made the sfpack utility seems to be dead, but you can
find a copy of the extraction utility at:

http://www.personalcopy.com/home.htm

: along with a few decent soundfonts, even a couple that are gzipped
for Linux users. The last time I tried it the utility worked fine using
Wine.

Most commonly the soundfonts are compressed with sfark these days and
there is a a Linux version of the extraction utility at:

http://www.melodymachine.com/

: which will extract both the normal and self extracting archives.

Later, Seeker