So I recently got a chance to try out live sequencing & mixing on LMMS. Nothing fancy, just a small party of sorts, with a couple of friends over. Start LMMS, put some beats on, tweak parameters, create loops in realtime while they're playing.
I found that LMMS actually works pretty well for this kind of purpose! I had a couple of Monstros, a couple of Kickers and some soundfonts playing on loops, then tweaking the various parameters to produce variations... if LMMS worked better with Jack, I could have recorded the session and it could have actually been pretty good! Although on the other hand, we could also implement our own live recording functionality... Well, anyway. Based on this short experience, I have some simple and easy ideas on how to improve this looping & live sequencing functionality of LMMS: * Piano roll: Make the note preview on piano roll optional. It's a bit hard to edit or add notes on the fly in the piano roll, when every change you make produces sound which messes up the sound you have going on currently. Not a hard thing to implement, just a switch to turn the piano roll preview sounds on/off. * Loops: Here, I think we could have some new buttons in the song editor, to improve loop-based workflow. By loop-based workflow, I mean that you start with something like a 4 bar loop in the song editor, play it on loop, modify it on the fly, then move on to the next 4 bars, or extend the loop to 8 bars, etc. So here's ideas for buttons: - Move loop forward/backward. This would move the current loop forwards/backwards by the amount of the current loop length. So basically, if you click forward, the loop length stays the same, but the start-marker "jumps over" the end marker, and the playhead would jump one loop-length also, so that the playback would continue seamlessly from the next loop. - Duplicate current loop. Basically, copies everything between the loop markers, and inserts them at the end of the current loop. - Erase current loop. Just for balance (maybe you clicked duplicate one time too many). Erases the contents of the current loop, and moves everything in front of the loop backwards by one looplength. - Double/halve loop length. Self-explanatory. These features I think would already go a long way towards improving live play and loop-based workflows on LMMS. We're not going to rival Bitwig or Ableton Live anytime soon, but it would be something. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open source business process management suite built on Java and Eclipse Turn processes into business applications with Bonita BPM Community Edition Quickly connect people, data, and systems into organized workflows Winner of BOSSIE, CODIE, OW2 and Gartner awards http://p.sf.net/sfu/Bonitasoft _______________________________________________ LMMS-devel mailing list LMMS-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lmms-devel
