On 04/08/12 15:32, Conrad J. Sabatier wrote:
On Sun, 08 Apr 2012 13:28:51 +1000
Da Rock<freebsd-questi...@herveybayaustralia.com.au> wrote:
On 04/08/12 11:39, Mario Lobo wrote:
On Saturday 07 April 2012 21:04:41 Tony wrote:
Hello!
Is anybody aware of any talented producers who produce their music
primarily on FreeBSD?
Thanks!
Tony
Man, that has been my dream for a good while!
Ardour is a fine multitrack but no MIDI, at least on FreeBSD. And
FBSD itself has lots of issues with MIDI.
Besides that, there is the driver problem with most professional
sound boards.
I am going to attempt something a quite bit out of my league which
is try to port the alsa drivers for my echo Gina3G board to FBSD.
If I can manage to do that, then I believe the rest will fall on my
lap by gravity.
I hope I don't blow up my desktop.
I'm eager to read the replies to the OP.
I have. Or more accurately my wife and co have, with me behind the
wheel. My wife is a musician and music teacher, and we only use
FreeBSD, so its a given here (and a massive drive for me to find a
way to support it).
We used simple tools: audacity, rosegarden, and hydrogen. We used a
usb yamaha sound board, and a ribbon mic for the vocals.
The biggest problem here is that rosegarden refuses to use jack for
midi transport now, so even though there is a jack_umidi daemon in
the ports it still wont pick it up. I'll have to look at another app
like ardour and see if it is better there. Other than that, all good.
Incidentally, the reason for the emphasis on rosegarden is that it
does midi and audio multitrack; as well as notation editing.
Apparently they're hell bent on only using alsa (God only knows why -
must have a death wish or something...), with marginal support for
jack. Hence they only support midi through alsa, not jack. Madness...
Yes, Rosegarden is a very nice app; it's just too bad we can't get true
MIDI working with it under FreeBSD. As an amateur (frustrated?)
composer, I *really* like the notation editing.
I don't know about not having true midi, midi seems fine its just the
software is (for some inexplicable reason) not supporting OSS anymore
and chasing the horrid monster that is alsa.
Even jack supports the freebsd midi using the daemon, but the software
doesn't suport jack midi. Like I said: madness...
For several months now, I've been unable to use Rosegarden at all
(under 10-CURRENT). It crashes very early on startup. Haven't been
able to track this one down yet.
Gosh, how I miss my early days with FreeBSD and my Soundblaster AWE64
with the special MIDI apps for it in the ports collection (back in the
good ol' days when OSS was our soundsystem).
The usb audio was a good call; the uaudio driver worked well in our
case with jack, and given all work was done on a laptop it made
sense. These days I think it makes more sense because of the
portability, not to mention if the power happens to go off in the
midst of a take you can keep going and finish the track ;)
The only other option that would be ideal would be firewire audio -
if that ever comes to FBSD. I think there may be some support through
jack, but I haven't investigated that fully yet.
And dont forget lilypond for notation... :)
I wish driver coding and such were more my area of expertise; I'd
gladly lend a hand to any efforts to improve our MIDI support.
Unfortunately, every time I've tried looking at any of the actual code
for the sound subsystem, it's left me in a veritable mystified
stupor. :-)
And lately, even some of the timidity++ stuff isn't working right. The
Xaw interface refuses to build/install properly, ever since the removal
of X11BASE from the ports infrastructure.
This is really my single, my one-and-only gripe with FreeBSD: MIDI!
Used to have a nice setup that was working beautifully, pretty much
comparable to what you might find under Windows or Mac. But the whole
thing got yanked out and replaced with the newpcm stuff back in -- what
year was it? -- sometime in the late 90s. Most unfortunate. I and a
number of others protested at the time, that we were having
functionality ripped out with no viable replacement in sight, and
sadly, that's still pretty much the case. MIDI support in FreeBSD has
never been the same since. :-(
The replacement is there now, but everything else has moved on.
Oh well, I'll shut up now. Hate to come off as a whiner or
something. :-)
No, I'd call it constructive criticism. Once my wife gets on my back
about it I imagine I'll be driving it all forward again, so maybe there
will be hope :)
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