On Friday 20 January 2006 17:33, Marcos Guglielmetti wrote: > I didn't knew that (about the no realiable way)
The biggest and probably most common problem is the hardware MIDI port with nothing attached to it. MIDI is a one way protocol, and it's perfectly legitimate to set up a synth as "read only" so that it doesn't feed back into the computer. My Sound Canvas is set up that way. So how do I query the Sound Canvas to see if anything is there? I can't. Of course things like the Sound Canvas seem to be all but extinct, and traditional 5-pin DIN MIDI cabling, and maybe even MIDI itself all seem slated for extinction in the forseeable future. Times are changing. All that bit I was just saying about the emu10k1 is in the same category too, really, being pragmatic about it. All that stuff I said is possible, but it might well not be worth any real effort. A few people might have one today, but nobody will have one tomorrow. They're not made anymore, and apparently the new ones don't have hardware MIDI chips on them, just like the later day Sound Blasters got rid of the C/MS chips. There isn't much use going to extraordinary efforts to support these comparatively rare cards that have no real future. I suppose when you get right down to it, the future of MIDI does lie with soft synths, whether I like it or not (and I most definitely don't.) In fact, to the extent that this is apparently now true (go try to buy a sound module, and you'll find that probably 3/4 of the things we have devices for in our library are no longer manufactured, and that people like Eridol are selling software synths instead of hardware) it might behoove us just to default to that. If someone has real hardware, odds are they already have a substantial clue in the first place. Case in point, me. I had external hardware when I came to Linux, and I asked the right questions, and got the right answers, and wound up fooling with this new thing called ALSA to get the damn thing working. I knew where I wanted to go, and it has been my experience that the majority of fellow users with similar hardware are in that same category, while the truly clueless (the vast majority of our users who post here; the non-clueless don't need help figuring out what to do in most cases, because it's close enough to what they expect) all have crap soundcards and need to run a soft synth. Many of them are new to this entire realm, not having wanted to drop a grand for some software for a commercial OS. > > GPL'd one to offer: we're back to the problem of how to get a decent > > "starter pack" GM synth or soundfont that's small enough to bundle, > > which we've looked at before but never got anywhere with). Can't bundle, no. Not with STG, especially, but there's some mileage out of the idea of something akin to the Debian flash plugin or MS core fonts packages. You install the package, and it just runs a script to wget the thing and do the right thing with it. We can't operate at the distro-specific package level, but we could do something similar, and there's nothing illegal about linking to a site in cyberspace somewhere. > That's a nice idea but, obvious, we will need an small and good GPL > soundfont to do that or: Yeah, which your Musix one isn't, or wasn't, the last time I played with it. Sounds terrible, and too many weird intonation problems. > I'm thinking about zynaddsubfx: it could be > possible to make a General MIDI Bank with zynaddsubfx, but I dont know Bleah. It's not 1989 anymore. Use synths for synths, but for the love of music, don't use a synth to try to simulate a banjo. A digital simulation of a banjo is bad enough. If we did come up with such a thing, people (especially ignorant people, who have no clue what's what, or how anything works) will just come up with reviews that "Rosegarden sounds really bad." > Ardour displays something about it, but in my first year using GNU+Linux > it was very incomprehensible to me... "what the hell is this JACK > stuff?, no, I will better use audacity!!!" Me too, FWIW. I did an entire CD of me, myself and I stuff with Audacity a few years ago. Clean. Simple. Easy. -- D. Michael 'Silvan' McIntyre ---- Silvan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621 Author of Rosegarden Companion http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/ ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=103432&bid=230486&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [email protected] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
