Anyone else muck around with music creation/sequencing software on Linux? I've only just poked at it a little, nothing serious (yet). What I've discovered so far...
- The default version of Rosegarden in the Ubuntu 10.04 repository is pretty flaky. I've just installed a newer one from one of the Launchpad PPAs, but it is still too early to tell how much of an improvement it is.
- JACK (which seems to be required to do anything beyond very rudimentary music creation/editing on Linux) and the PulseAudio sound system (which is a standard part of Ubuntu these days) don't play very nice together. The best you can hope for seems to be an uneasy truce between the two. The drill seems to be close any audio applications which are using PulseAudio before starting JACK, and restart the PulseAudio server (which typically gets very confused when JACK runs) after you're done with JACK.
- Qsynth/FluidSynth seems to be a reasonable back-end software synth for Rosegarden (which does not have its own built-in software synth). But it seems you gotta make sure you start Qsynth first, *then* Rosegarden, or things don't always work right. There's probably a way to fix that with one of the JACK tools... I'm still sorting all this stuff out.
- Still trying to figure out how to find good free (and legal) SoundFont banks without wading through gazillions of files on random poorly maintained web sites. (I guess the default ones in the Ubuntu repository will do for now...)
- Still trying to figure out how LADSPA (for effects plugins) fits into the picture.
It all feels very much like trying to cobble something together with duct tape and hot glue... but I'm learning some interesting stuff!