Hi. I've been tinkering with lmms for about year. My goal is to set up a complete symphony orchestra using the sf2 player. I'm currently running lmms v1.03 (from kxstudio) on a Ubuntu system.
Some background: I compose using Musescore so I can write real notes on a real score, then use Musescore's playback to send the notes' midi events to an sf2 sampler. I've had great success with Musescore attached to LinuxSampler (check out http://youtu.be/tBq2p_xHA9s and http://youtu.be/tR9wVrFlYbE on YouTube), but it's wildly complicated to set up. The LinuxSampler interface is nasty, effects for each instrument have to be loaded in a separate plugin host, and the whole thing has to be cabled together in another program (Claudia from kxstudios). I'd love to use lmms for my work. Everything I need is one place, the interface is a joy to use, and managing plugins is a snap. It's the perfect sf2 player, but for one thing: playback is awful. I get dropped notes, parts that aren't syncronized, and uneven tempi. Despite this, I've persevered with lmms for a couple of projects (check out http://youtu.be/LdFzy-OcTDo for an example). The results sound wonderful, but they're achieved at the cost of splicing bits and pieces together from multiple renderings of the score. (The playback issues I mentioned happen randomly in different locations.) I've tried everything I can to improve lmms' performance - killing the dreaded pulseaudio - maxing out lmms' buffer (latency isn't an issue for score playback) - stopping every unnecessary service, app, and daemon - disabling compositing - rescheduling lmms' CPU and HDD access to higher priority but the playback is still randomly uneven or unsynchronized, and there are still random dropped notes. Exporting isn't an option because I'm not using the Song Editor. Further background: Since I'm using an external program to drive lmms, I run JACK with a2jmidid in order to expose midi input channels for each sf2 instrument loaded in lmms. (Question: Why, if it's the *Linux* Multimedia Studio, isn't JACK supported for both playback and midi?) A full symphony orchestra needs a lot of channels, so I set Musescore to use four midi output ports (16 channels apiece) and create four ALSA "Midi Through Ports". Output from the first Musescore port goes to the first Midi Through Port, which is then connected to the first 16 instruments in lmms. Output from the second Musescore port goes to the second Midi Through Port, attached to the next 16 instruments in lmms, etc. The problems I experience with lmms are not due to inadequate system resources, since I can achieve flawless playback from Musescore using LinuxSampler and a plugin host, as described above. I also note that the issues I'm having date as far back as 2009, where Linux Journal notes: "LMMS has some excellent features, but alas, performance isn't among them...I seriously doubt that my hardware is insufficient for LMMS, particularly since the machine runs other resource-hungry realtime applications without audio complaints." Furthermore, I doubt JACK is reponsible for the poor playback, since xruns during playback are zero. Is there a magic bullet I'm missing to get glitch-free playback from lmms? I'd love to be able to use it, and to promote its use for setups such as mine, but, at present, I can't. Playback--the one thing lmms needs to be perfect at--just isn't reliable enough. -- Peter Schaffter http://www.schaffter.ca ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Slashdot TV. Video for Nerds. Stuff that matters. http://tv.slashdot.org/ _______________________________________________ Lmms-users mailing list Lmms-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lmms-users
