I am a musician
A fucking bad musician actually, but I learn…
Yes, there are harminies and scales, accords and arpeggios and so on, which I study every day as well as practicing my trumpet itself. And I have quite good progress I think.
But very frequently I want to play some simple (or complex) motive of the melody I hear. Or ‘workaround’ it a little… At home I can play piano and try to pick out melody by ears, but in office or anywhere near computer I can not do this.
The reason is simple: Linux does not have a piano synthesizer. Well, it has plenty of them, but each one plays through MIDI. And audio system in Linux is only good for listening. MIDI/alsa/oss/jackd/pulseaudio – thousands of them, and this web only works in some precise setups.
I tried to install plenty of MIDI software on Ubuntu Lucid Lyx – epic fail. Jackd stops, pulseaudio crashes and freezes… It is such a mess.
So I decided to write a trivial application which will look like a piano keyboard and play recorded samples instead of going through MIDI synth when keyboard or mouse keys are pressed. I checked FreshMeat – there are only MIDI synthesizer there.
And I need a simple, fast, nice and non-brain-fucking in setup application, which just plays what I press.
Presentation bit: Elliptics network implementaion details Shooting at elliptics@libeblob with lots of data
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it sends and receives events through MIDI channels.
I will install it and check wheter it will work out of the box, but I’m pretty sure it wont :(
UPD: it worked, but crashed after a while… And a bit too complex for me now.
lmms http://lmms.sourceforge.net/ has a tiny keyboard preview and some soft synths, probably not optimal for your usecase, but maybe good enough?
Pianoteq Trial 3.6.1 plays nice with some limits. No crashes, no lags just work.
I downloaded trial version, unzipped and started.
In audio device selection screen it failed to test (no sound) ALSA (HDA Nvidia) output. No logs or information present.
lolnoob