linuxaudio.org

Dave Robillard wrote:

quoted text
> On Wed, 2007-22-08 at 13:22 +0100, Simon Williams wrote:

>> I'm now at the point where I can play midi files, and I have a midi

>> keyboard connected and can play sounds to and from that.

>> Timidity is rubbish, frankly, so I'm using fluidsynth, which works fine.

>> However, for some reason I can't get qsynth to work.

>>

>> Qsynth1: Failed to create the MIDI driver (alsa_seq). No MIDI input will

>> be available.

>>

>> No matter what settings I try, it always fails. The only useful message

>> I ever got was for alsa_raw, when it said that the device didn't exist.

>> For some reason I have /dev/snd/midiC1D0, but not /dev/snd/midiC0D0. So

>> I temporarily symlinked them, but that didn't help- it wasn't

>> complaining about a missing device any more, but it still couldn't

>> create the midi driver and still wouldn't tell me why not.

>>

>> Also, both fluidsynth and timidity are too slow. Midi events are routed

>> around instantly (tested with vkeybd and the keyboard I have plugged

>> in), but there is a delay in playing anything sent to fluidsynth or

>> timidity- about half a second or so.

>

> Use a smaller (audio) buffer size.

Adding the '-a jack' option to fluidsynth fixed it. I also added '-r

48000' to get the periods to match which probably helped.
Now that I know I can play midi in realtime, how do I start doing

interesting things with it? Sure I've got fluidsynth, but my current

keyboard only has 8 instrument buttons, and fluidsynth isn't much good

for changing the instrument on the fly.

So far I have 2 options:

1. Use the selectors on my keyboard to get whatever the first 8

instruments are in my soundfont.

2. Use another program to pick the instrument- but so far I haven't

found anything that will let me pick a selection of instruments- I can

only pick one and then the selectors on my keyboard don't do anything.
Also, I would love to be able to mix together two or more instruments-

and be able to specify the range, volume and fading of each one.

As an example, so that I could have something like:

1. Piano sound- for everything except the last octave

2. Bass guitar- Mainly on lower half of the keyboard, fades out towards

the middle

3. Flute or something- just on the last octave
Also, when I get my hands on a decent midi controller keyboard I want to

be able to use the extra buttons, knobs and sliders to control the

mixing above, and things like auto drum accompaniment and other synth

effects, but as yet I haven't seen any software which will let me do this.
Any suggestions?
Thanks

Simon