First Steps with Music Software in Linux

There are not (so far) many musical things that I want to do in the computer, but playing a MIDI file; mixing it with my own recording of playing one of the parts, and exporting it all into an audio file is one of them, so today I set some time to learn the basics.  In the computer I did this I'm running Ubutu 10.04, and I have followed the instructions in the Ubuntu Studio pages to quickly install all the software that I need (and much more), and to configure it.

With that in place, I rebooted the PC into the RealTime Kernel, and then I started by running JACK, Qsynth and Rosegarden. (Qsynth needs some soundfonts, and I downloaded some into the file /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2. I don't remember where I got them from, but you can get them, for example, at http://musescore.org/handbook/soundfont). This looks like:

Then, it is time to check that all connectivity is working OK. The "Connect" button in the JACK interface will show the connections available. In my case:

This shows that the "General MIDI Device" in Rosegarden is connected to FLUID Synth (QSynth is just the GUI for fluidsynth), so all should be OK.

Then in Rosegarden we load a MIDI file, and select the instruments you want, modify the volume, reverb, etc. It took me a while (perhaps it should have been faster if I had read the documentation) to figure out how to select different instruments for each track, but it is actually quite easy. Just select one of the tracks:

Then say which instrument number you are going to use for that track:

My confusion for a while was to trust the name of what it would appear in the "Instrument" description, before I actually configured each instrument sound. So, the description in the "Instrument" field can be wrong. I guess it keeps whatever it was used last time with whatever synthesizer, so don't trust it, and instead, once you have selected the instrument number, you should specify the sound to be used for that instrument number:

With that in place (you will see that now the Instrument description in the track parameters section above reflects the change made here), you can now use Rosegarden to play the MIDI file with whatever instruments you choose.

So now we just have to record it into an audio file. This is done quite easily by just routing the output of Qsynth to Ardour. First, we will need to create at least one track with Ardour (here in the example: Audio1):

 Then, in JACK we will have to connect the output from Qsynth to Ardour:

And lastly is just a matter of recording (first we have to select in which track we will be recording, in this case Audio 1,and then proceed with the "main" recording):

Adding other audio tracks (from an external mic, another software, etc.) would follow similar steps in Ardour. The last step is just to "export session to audiofile".

A  basic MIDI-performance obtained in this way can be found at vimeo