ngreey

On my machine running debian linux, I want to use rosegarden to notate music and play it back. The evidence suggests that I have a MIDI card but rosegarden will not play back at all and neither will any other notation program. I have set up my card in the little midi setup menu in rosegarden. I don't actually know so much about my system specs due to various modifications and have lost track. It has a 900mhz processor though and running lspci -v | grep audio returns:

00:07.5 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50)
Subsystem: VIA Technologies, Inc. Device 4511
Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 5
I/O ports at dc00 [size=256]
I/O ports at e000 [size=4]
I/O ports at e400 [size=4]
Capabilities: [c0] Power Management version 2
Kernel driver in use: VIA 82xx Audio
Kernel modules: snd-via82xx

I have tried playing a midi file and that didn't work so it seems that the problem is in midi itself.

wmorri

So the "card" that you are talking about, I am guessing is your video card? Have you checked to make sure that your rosegarden, is being picked up as a peripheral, and that your distro of linux will read from it.(Which reminds me what disto are you using?). If you can answer those questions it will help us a lot.

Cheers!

K-B

On my Ubuntu box (ubuntu is based off of Debian), I had to install the program "timidity" before I was able to play midi files.

If you're using Debian linux, see:
http://wiki.debian.org/Timidity

And:
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/timidity

ngreey

I have now installed timidity, but am not really sure what to do with it.

I made no deliberate reference to a video card, I have a definitely working audio card and the evidence suggests I have a midi card. I think configured the latter in rosegarden.

I don't know what a peripheral is and thus, haven't checked that my card is being picked up as one and am using debian.

K-B

If I remember, correctly, I installed timidity, and some other timidity plugin package....can't remember the name. After that, I could play midi in mplayer or any of the other players.

GTrax

Rosegarden has more, and needs more than Timidity.

The "audio-studio" centered Distros use a kernel where the kernel tick latency has been set from the default 250Hz up to 1000Hz. When I first tried Rosegarden, it refused, with an error message asking for the tick rate to be set to 1000Hz. Not many Distros come with it set like that as standard.

I eventually go it to work in a Gentoo install, which I then broke from ineptitude. The experience of using the menu configurator to make a hand crafted, absolutely hardware-optimized kernel was way better than messing up in getting the MIDI software to run. It was lightning fast! So I got distracted

The choices are..
1. A Distro devoted to audio, with the latency preset suitable.
2. Put a Distro on a partition, with a re-compiled a kernel, copied into the /boot directory.
3. Use a LiveCD eg. Studio64. This is handy if you don't know how to set up multiboot from partitions.
4. Try UbuntuStudio, but go for the earlier 8.04 instead of 8.10 if you need the real-time kernel.
5. Possibly the Gentoo-derived "Sabayon", being media oriented, will do it OK, but I have not tried it.

There is a kernel option known as "tickless" which suits low-latency requirements.

There is a truly comprehensive MIDI setup How-To linked here <--
It even explains how to change the kernel. I strongly advise using a multibooted Distro on a separate partition, where it does not matter if you mess up.

At my level, the combination of Rosegarden + Lilypond + an audio synth package would deliver functionality similar to that from (say) "Sibelius" composition software in Windows. I only want to be play back MIDI file tracks at a speed I choose, to learn the notes on a sax