An overgrown MIDI Rosegarden

Since the kids still seem to be enjoying piano lessons, I took some slush fund money and bought a digital piano with 88 weighted keys, rather than having them practice any more on an electronic keyboard with no piano action. I got a Yamaha P-70, very nice sound, not too unreasonable a price.

Since I was getting a nice keyboard, I thought it would be nice to get back into the MIDI world. I'd played with MIDI since waaaay back in the days of the original Macintoshes. I had one of Mark of the Unicorn's first MIDI interfaces, and at one point had a MIDI setup that included an E-Mu Proteus and a Korg Wavestation. I sold all that when I moved down here, so it's been 10 years since I've played with anything MIDI.

Since my Ubuntu machine is closest to the keyboard, I thought I'd see what the world of open source software offered MIDI-wise. So I installed Ubuntu Studio, an AV-oriented package of tools that even comes along with a low-latency kernel. The USB to MIDI interface (an M-Audio MidiSport Uno) was recognized right away. The only problem is sorting out all the software. There's a program aptly named JACK that handles all the connections, both MIDI and audio, from any music-based program that's running. The main sequencer is Rosegarden, and there's a software synth that uses soundfonts called QSynth.

Theoretically, all this stuff should work together. Well, I can get Rosegarden to play a MIDI file out to my P-70, but I can't seem to figure out how to send program change info to the P-70, or to get QSynth to play along. Plus, the sound font I downloaded is way out of tune with the P-70. Oh, and something is totally screwed up with either the P-70's MIDI output, or how it interacts with the M-Audio MIDI interface, as it won't record or work as a controller for sound playback unless I do this weird voodoo-like setup on it (set doubled voices and make sure both are tuned to +0 octaves).

On the Mac, GarageBand is certainly a much easier program to set up (plug in the interface, do the P-70 voodoo setup thing, play!), but it's not a MIDI sequencer and so doesn't play MIDI data back out to the P-70.

So, regardless of where I do it, it's yet another rat's nest. Oh well, at least the piano has some nice built-in demo songs.