Hi there,

It's been a long  time since I last saw a post  dealing with Brahms. Has
any of you folks been able to *use* it?

I didn't.

After having  spent hours  and hours trying  to get it  to work,  I have
written a  bug report. In order  not to clutter  the list with a  lot of
computer generated blah-blah  coming from the gdb  backtrace facility, I
made it under the form of an HTMLized version with color and all.

But beware that if you want to reproduce my steps, you need at least

-- the   packages  arts-1.0.3-7mdk.src.rpm   brahms-1.02-4mdk.src.rpm
-- a working gcc/g++/gdb  environment 
-- a basic understanding  of MIDI music sequencing

The URL is:

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/denix13/Brahms/brahmsbug.html

Here are the bare facts:

The     Brahms    MIDI     sequencing     application    coming     from
Mandrake/9.0/contrib/RPMS/brahms-1.02-4mdk.i586.rpm does not work.

-- When invoked at the prompt as "brahms", it opens its main windows but
does not play neither manually entered notes nor imported MIDI files.

-- When invoked as  "brahms -o arts" in order to  output to aRts instead
of ALSA  (the default for  Mandrake version),  it aborts with  a message
notifying that brahms and aRts should be installed at the same location.
This message is misleading as brahms  and aRts are actually installed at
the same location, thanks Mandrake!

--  Further  investigation  shows  that  this  problem  is  due  to  the
incapacity of the  daemon artsd to dynamically load  a particular shared
library  when this  one is  stripped: not  stripping the  library solves
the  problem.  This  is  however  a bug  that  prevents  current  binary
implementation of aRts/Brahms to run on Mandrake.

--    Building    brahms    from     the    source    RPM    found    in
Mandrake-devel/contrib/SRPMS/brahms-1.02-4mdk.src.rpm   fails,  probably
beacause  the configuration  is set  for  a parallel  make. However  the
source  coming from  a  forthcoming KMusic  application, which  includes
brahms, compiles flawlessly.

-- Nevertheless, brahms still crashes. Actually, the problem seems to be
located in the artsd daemon, which  segfaults as soon as Brahms wants to
play something.

I have sent emails  to the respective authors of aRts  and brahms, and I
would really appreciate your help as I need that kind of software for my
musical research.

More generally a working  full-featured MIDI sequencing musical software
in a free software framework can be a strong bonus for the reputation of
Mandrake Linux in the field of multimedia applications.

Long live Linux Mandrake!

Denix13

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