is there a hydrogen like program where you can use different instruments such as a trumpet, flute, etc. I would prefer a gui based app but any suggestions are fine.

Stuff like this?
Sequencers?
http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/rosegarden/
http://brahms.sourceforge.net/


Cheers, and God bless,
Tink

do you know of any good tutorials for these progs?

thx

Sorry, nope, but did you Google ?

Cheers,
Tink

Lot's of music software here :

http://linux-sound.org/

Lot's of good stuff.

I got Brahms to work but with only the piano and harpsicord, how do I get the trumpet to work in a software synthesis situation. I followed the instruction to go into th aRts control tool midi manager then ADD aRts synthesis MIDI output select arts_all after doing this and adding a trak and editing it it will play but brass and drums won't play

*Bump*

i've been using Jazz as a midi sequencer, i think rosegarden may be more powerful, but i started with jazz so that's what i'm used to, and i haven't had any problems (yet). it's relatively intuitive and easy to use. i also use fluidsynth software synthesizer, because my soundcard doesn't do midi. fluidsynth lets you load soundfont2 files, and there's an application Swami (swami.sourceforge.net) that allows you to create your own soundfont2 files or edit existing ones.
since you're using a softsynth, some soundfont files might not be compatible because sometimes they are made to make use of ROM samples that would be available if you were using a wavetable soundcard like soundblaster. softsynths don't have these ROM files, so a softsynth might let you load a soundfont file that calls for these ROM samples but won't produce any sound for voices that use ROM samples, but in this case you should get some sort of error message upon loading the soundfont, something about ROM.
you might find it rewarding to read the soundfont docs on the swami site.

You might want to have a look at:

http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/

and

http://filter24.org/seq24

because I couldn't even get rosegarden to run for more than five minutes before it decided to
crash.

You might also want to stick with ZynAddSubFX-2.0.0: versions after this gave me glitches
with the base frequency oscillator taking every harmonic edit as additive (even when I was returning
the value to the original value, it added the difference between the current and original and added it
to the current...... lots of white noise and bleeding ears.)

Hope this helps,
~Cic

P.S. - You may also find http://www.hydrogenmusic.org/ interesting if you're looking for a drum machine.
Really, this is the best drum sequencer I've ever seen. (Granted, I haven't seen much =P )