Rosegarden vs Sibelius - in an unorthodox way

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Veerstryngh Thynner
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Rosegarden vs Sibelius - in an unorthodox way

Post by Veerstryngh Thynner »

Greetings all,

On my IBM 64 bit Intel (R) Core (TM) i 5-3470 CPU @320 GHz 3.20 GHz desktop I'm currently running DreamStudio 12.04 LTS. RAM = 4 GB; DHH = 750 GB. Besides, I have Windows 7 Professional, as auxiliary, in a VM - with Sibelius as sole application. And being far from a whizz kid - let alone an IT engineer - I'd need a relatively straightforward manner to electronically reproduce/record audio of musical instruments I normally don't play.

With a MIDI interface correctly connected and just an empty stave opened in Sibelius (say clarinet), hitting a piano key will effortlessly produce the correct sound. What's more: clarinet can now be played as if it were a real instrument. And even with VM/Windows/Sibelius relegated to another Workspace, in my specific setup, audio will still easily be captured in an Ubuntu Audacity or Ardour score, in principle.

This worked, by and large. But not completely, alas: the one big snag here that latency is truly atrocious: this because GS Wavetable Synth is Window's standard sound provider - and it can't be switched off! Every attempt at replacing it with ASIO4ALL (latency 0) has failed, so far.

And now I wonder if what I previously have been trying with Sibelius could be achieved with Rosegarden. Or is the latter, like every notation tool previously attempted in Ubuntu, limited to one note at a time as well?

tnob
Pablo
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Re: Rosegarden vs Sibelius - in an unorthodox way

Post by Pablo »

If I understand well, you use Sibelius only as a sound generator and you don't need its notation and sequencing features. In this case, Rosegarden is not comparable to Sibelius in the way you think, because it doesn't have an internal, hard-coded, soft synth. In other words, Rosegarden is just a sequencer that doesn't make sounds by itself but it needs either an instrument plugin or an external synth (software or hardware). The same happens for qtractor and most other linux sequencers, by the way.

So leave alone the sequencing and the staves and you have several choices. Linuxsampler plays gig and sfz files. fluidsynth plays sf2 files. These kind of files are sound libraries. I suggest you search for a gig or sfz clarinet instrument and try linuxsampler-qsampler with it (qsampler is the GUI, one of them).

Cheers, Pablo
Veerstryngh Thynner
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Re: Rosegarden vs Sibelius - in an unorthodox way

Post by Veerstryngh Thynner »

Hi Pablo,

Thanks for your clarification.

Yes, you're right: the intention was indeed to employ Sibelius as a mere sound generator. That should be far the easiest solution for processing virtual instruments in Ubuntu Audacity/Ardour - as far as my specific system setup goes, anyway.

Thing is, though, working around Windows' perpetually infernal GS Wavetable/ASIO4ALL conflict seems impossible, since GS Wavetable refuses to budge - whatever I try. On Windows forums, too, many are tearing their hair out because of this. But since I'm on a Linux website here, much help in what is, essentially, a Windows matter is probably not to be expected.

This message comes from my laptop. Music is produced on a desktop - one without functional online connection. Since Linuxsampler is not in Software Centre, Linuxsampler/Fluidsynth/whatever else needed has to be downloaded on laptop and subsequently transferred.

- Where best to go to for Linuxsampler, in this scenario?
- Anything else I might require to make Fluidsynth or another virtual synth operational (dependencies I'm thinking of here)?
- I also had a look at ZynAdSubFX. Three hundred virtual instruments included certainly sounds attractive. Judging from the developer's website, however, downloading it from there needs serious compiling, to my understanding - and I don't have any experience with that. Where to download it from in one piece?
- Incidentally: is Linuxsampler a requirment for ZynAdSubFX as well?
- Any guidance on samples/sampling in general available online, perhaps, for beginners like me? In plain English would truly be helpful.

tnob
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