Hello all-

I'm trying to build a Linux Audio Workstation. This is for multitracking audio and MIDI. Rosegarden and Ardour are some good examples of applications I'd like to use.

Mostly, though, I'm a programming geek and I'd like to take advantage of Linux to build a lot of my own tools.

At the moment, I've installed Fedora Core 4, and added the Planet CCRMA extensions. However, I've found it's not a very good audio workstation. The ALSA serial port MIDI driver simply doesn't work (and I haven't found any way to debug it), and even XMMS has serious problems playing audio. Loading a new (static) page in Firefox will cause the mp3 playback to stutter (!). Rosegarden often locks up the computer when I close the application (to be fair to Rosegarden, it's probably a driver bug).

What would Linux gurus recommend as a distro/drivers? Is there a good forum for this sort of question? Are there any Linux-based musicians around? Have you found ALSA to be a reliable platform, or do you recommend something else? Should I even bother with serial port MIDI, or should I get a simple card that supports midi out?

Many thanks for any help or suggestions. I've been tinkering (and re-installing distros) for a week or so now, and haven't had much luck getting reliable audio performance.

-Thomas

I've heard DeMuDi is considered to be quite good.

check out http://linux-sound.org/ they have links to alsorsts or music software, also have a section on audio distros.

You dont mention it, but have you tried using JACK ("professional-quality low-latency audio server").

Ive just switched over to Arch linux from slackware, it has a nice packaging system with quite a few audio tools and isnt too hard to create your own packages. I find it pretty quick, bugs are squashed quickly and very up to date.


Most half decent soundcards game ports double up as a midi port.

me (I dual boot, so get the best of both worlds). Hydrogen (drum machine) is probably what I use the most in linux though, and it syncs up quit nicely with other apps (sequencers etc) using jack.

I hope some of this info helps, good luck with your search.

Hello all-

Many thanks for the suggestions! Based on my experiences so far, setting up an audio workstation is quite challenging.

I've tried the Dynebolic and Demudi distros, neither one was noticeably better than FC4 for audio support. I've switched back to FC4.

I did shell out $15 for a simple PCI soundcard that suported midi out via the game port. That seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

However, I still can't get it detected. I've been googling/surfing for days, and haven't yet found a way to debug alsa midi issues.

- How can I verify that ALSA even detected my MIDI game port?
- How do I debug sending/receiving MIDI through the game port?

Any pointers appreciated.

I'm keeping a log at **** for anyone who is interested.

Thanks!

-Thomas


PS - I just found out I'm not allowed to post a URL yet. Once I'm allowed to post a URL to my log I will do so.

I forgot to add--JACK rocks, I'm pretty impressed by that.

Only hurdle at the moment is that I can't get my Linux box to talk to my external MIDI devices.

Hello again!

Sorry to keep posting. I'm about to stop work for the day, and I thought I'd post where I was in case any technically-minded people had any suggestions on my configuration.

Again, my problem is that I can't seem to get midi apps (Rosegarden, KMid, pmidi) to play midi to external MIDI devices. I've tried both serial port, and game port. I'm currently troubleshooting the game port setup.

If I try the alsa midi player ("% aplaymidi -l") I see

I think that's just the serial port? Which didn't work in any case. Or is that the emulator? (I'm not interested in emulators at the moment).

pmidi gives the same result as aplaymidi.

Here is what I get when I cat /proc/asound/oss/sndstat:

I like that both cards show up, but I'm a little freaked out by the line: Midi devices: NOT ENABLED IN CONFIG

Should I be worried about that? I don't see any midi* entries in /dev either. Should I see /dev/midiC0D0 or something similar?

Here is the output of /proc/asound/cards, which looks right (I think):

Here is my /etc/modprobe.conf:

And here are all of my running modules ("% lsmod | grep snd"):

To my untrained eye, that all looks pretty good (I see the gameport, uart, midi, and sequencer modules) but then it is all the more perplexing that midi isn't working.

Any thoughts as to why MIDI is working through either the serial or game ports? Should I be seeing a midi device under /dev? Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

-Thomas

Well, I finally got my audio to work. I have a functional Linux Audio Workstation! I was able to do multitrack recording sync'd with MIDI using Rosegarden and JACK.

The missing piece? I had to manually edit /etc/modprobe.conf so alsa could find my game port for midi.

Here are the steps I would recommend for newbies (and also see http://www.geocities.jp/midi_organ_net/alsa/, I found that really helpful):

1) See if your card is even detected. Run "lspci" and make sure your card shows up.

2) Verify alsa initialized your card. Run "cat /proc/asound/cards" and double check that your card(s) are listed.

3) See if alsa is running with midi. Run "cat /proc/asound/oss/sndstat" and see that midi is working.

In my case, midi wasn't working. It said midi was NOT ENABLED IN CONFIG (see above).

So I followed the excellent instructions at midi_organ_net (?) and enabled the game port in /etc/modprobe.conf. I added his exact line:

options snd-ymfpci mpu_port=0x330

to my /etc/modprobe.conf file (I was using the ymfpci driver for the soundcard with the game port, so that makes sense).

I rebooted, and voila! I was able to stream midi out through my Yamaha card, and record/playback using my Delta M66.

Only one remaining problem: playing back midi files (using KMid or pmidi or anything) would crash the kernel (panic). Stack dump seemed to indicate the mpu401 driver.

However, if I boot using the realtime kernel from Planet CCRMA, everything seems to work. So I haven't debugged that further.

My install log is posted at http://www.wavepacket.net/tomva/wl-005-law.html

-Thomas

Thanks for the info! As soon as I get a system with 512MB RAM or more, I'm gonna give this a try!