Club Linux Coffs Harbour

As a (very) amatuer musician I've often wanted to experiment with electronic music creation.

Linux, Rosegarden, Lilypond, Jack and Fluidsynth/Qsynth, along with a Digital Piano for Christmas, have finally made this little dream come alive.

Just 5 years ago I would have had to pay some thousands of dollars for proprietary software, along with some similar thousands for a professional digital piano. All of this has now been made obsolete by low-latency linux kernels and supporting opensource audio and midi applications, along with sub $1000 digital pianos with feel, response and capabilities that match or exceed their expensive professional cousins of just a few years ago.

To my astonishment, this brand new digital piano released only six months ago, and connected by USB Midi appeared in Rosegarden's Midi Manager the moment it was plugged in and turned on. I was able to record and play midi to/from Rosegarden literally within minutes.

Not only that; having recorded a phrase or two of music onto a midi track I double clicked it to be greeted by a window with it's perfect translation into written music notation or manuscript. A little more fiddling revealed that the notation could be fully interactively edited with each edited note sounding during edit. Musically correct transposition along with automatic key signature change, and automatic generation of rests during manual composition round off this amazing package nicely. If your playing is a bit rusty, as mine is, you can even set a coarse granularity so that slightly off beat notes are corrected during manuscript generation.

Following recording or composition, there's a choice of playback to the music keyboard or the computer's speakers. Using Fluidsynth (with QSynth GUI frontend), and some nice soundfonts downloaded from the web, playback through my very ordinary built in sound card was, well, stunning!

If you're interested in this, download all the software using your Linux distribution's built in software manager, then read about it at the following sites: Rosegarden, Lilypond, Jack, FluidSynth, QSynth

You can compose music without a music keyboard, so even if you don't have one the software can do a lot.

If you presently use Windows for this, I'm told you'll be very pleasantly surprised by Linux's very low latency real-time characteristics, permitting many more simultaneous tracks without audio dropouts, even on low grade hardware.

While you're only experimenting, there's no need to set up a real-time kernel, and you can run Jack in usermode which is not realtime. You likely won't need real-time low latency until you're operating professionally using many tracks simultaneously.

I haven't set up realtime low-latency, and on my old AMD Sempron 2200+ with 750Mb RAM there have been no audible dropouts yet. My advice: get in and use the software and leave the more fiddly bits until you really need them.

Enjoy!