In this week’s Creative Commons Artist Spotlight, we interview French artists Monsieur Madame about their CC-licensed album Et Maintenant, available at Jamendo.com.

Why did you decide to release your music under a Creative Commons license?

Because we just want to be heard. It’s hard to sell music because there are a lot of bands. We just like to play live music and share it with people. The Creative Commons is a good way to share directly.

How much of your work is CC-licensed?

All tracks of the CD (Et Maintenant) are CC-licensed. The new ones, not yet.

Who are your musical influences?

Maybe are we influenced by French bands, such as Rita Mitsouko or Thomas Fersen, for example.

What tools do you use to produce your music?

A guitar and a pen (to write songs!)

Which of your CC-licensed songs is your favorite?

I think that it’s “Du sable entre les doigts de pied” because it’s sweet!

Are you touring, and if so, how can readers find you?

No, for the moment. We are trying to play in live once a month in Paris, in the Bibax Bar (10th arrondissement) for example.

Anything you’d like our readers to know about you?

We’re going to work on a new CD in october. We’ve already got 12 new songs so… Let’s go!

Today we’re proud to introduce a new feature: Creative Commons Artist Spotlight, which Red Hat Magazine will be producing in association with jamendo.com. Every week, we will introduce our readers to emerging musical artists who choose to release their work under Creative Commons licenses.

This week’s band, Convey, hails from Acton, Massachusetts. Their debut EP can be found at jamendo.com.

Why did you decide to release your music under a Creative Commons license?

We felt as though Creative Commons gave us the freedom to distribute our music, while giving our fans the ability to listen to and share it. On a larger scale, we believe that CC is the future of the record industry as a whole. In most cases, musical artists make the majority of their living off live performances and merchandizing, while record companies benefit off of the artists’ record sales. Hopefully, someday, artists will not have to rely on record companies for publicity.

How much of your work is CC-licensed?

All of our recorded material is CC-licensed, and we are planning on recording more.

Who are your musical influences?

Circa Survive, Thrice, Tool, A Perfect Circle, Incubus, P.O.D., Korn, Rage Against the Machine, Saosin, Disturbed, Sevendust, RA, System of a Down, Breaking Benjamin, Muse, Billy Talent, Moneen.

What tools do you use to produce your music?

We recorded at a local recording studio, and then advertise using live performance, Myspace, Facebook, Last.fm, our website (www.conveymusic.com), and, of course, Jamendo!

Which of your CC-licensed songs is your favorite?

We love them as if they were our rabbits. Could YOU pick a favorite?

Are you touring, and if so, how can readers find you?

We are planning a tour summer of 2008. Check www.conveymusic.com for updates!

Anything you’d like our readers to know about you?

Will is a lefty. If he was British, he would be Paul McCartney. Ben is Jewish, like Matis Yahu. Jahan has a higher metabolism than anyone I know. Dave is sinister beast. Chris is Italian, like Tony Soprano and Frank Sinatra. We all live in suburbs and enjoy chicken caesar salads at Sorrento’s Pizza. To contact our manager, Peter, call 1-339-223-9666.

Years ago, we had some great radio stations in Raleigh. One of the greatest was WRDU 106.1. They dominated the airwaves in this town for years; in fact, RDU was consistently voted one of the top rock stations in the country by readers of Rolling Stone magazine. I was one of those readers, and I looked forward to the opportunity to vote for RDU every year. They had top-notch DJs who knew their rock and roll. They were amazing at balancing music I knew and loved with music I didn’t yet know, but would come to love.

Last week, WRDU became “The Rooster” — a Clear Channel codename for “the best country music of yesterday and today, as defined by our algorithms, with no live DJs ever.” The best part: it’s not even the only station called Rooster Country 106. Clear Channel has another Rooster Country 106: WSTH in Columbus, Georgia. Not to be confused, of course, with Rooster Country 93.3 in Jacksonville, Florida — which for some reason can be found at roostercountry107.com.

Some people around here are calling it the end of an era. Some people on Wikipedia are claiming that it’s a stunt, and that WRDU will be back in a few short months on the other end of the dial. Other people apparently don’t care for that interpretation of events, and have re-edited the Wikipedia entry accordingly.

And me? I was disappointed to hear about the format change, and amused to discover that it has evidently spawned a wiki war — but the reality is that, for me and a lot of people like me, RDU died years ago when Clear Channel came to town. I’ve been tuned-out of America’s radio airwaves ever since.

Just because I stopped listening to the radio, didn’t mean that I stopped loving music. It just meant that I had to go about loving it differently.

For me, and for most of my friends, that meant using the internet. Between internet radio and the file sharing revolution, I discovered that I had more opportunities than ever to discover lots of music — some of which was new, but most of which was just new to me.

These days, the online distribution of music is completely mainstream. Apple is working hard to convince everyone that it’s all about iTunes and the iPod. But there’s still a lot of room for innovation in online music delivery — and some of that innovation is happening with the help of open source development.

Slim Devices produces the Squeezebox and the Transporter, both of which are receiving rave reviews from all over for their seamless integration of online music into the home stereo environment. The magic behind both of these devices: SlimServer, a network music server available under the GPL.

Recently I chatted with Dean Blackketter, the CTO of Slim Devices, about the relationship between Slim Devices and their community.

RHM: Give me a bit of history around the Slimserver. Which came first, the Slimserver or the SliMP3/Squeezebox?

DB: Sean Adams, the founder, built the first SliMP3 units in his garage back in 2001. At that time I was at home, hand-building some network music players based on cheap, commodity PC hardware for myself, friends, and family. I wrote some PHP scripts to drive those things. When I saw Sean’s announcement I bought one of the very first units. When I got mine, he emailed me a page of Perl code called “slimp3.pl”–a program that let you browse a folder and play a song.

I figured I’d rewrite the thing in C, but first I had to learn Perl to know how it worked. I bought a copy of Learning Perl and read the thing in one night. I though that it would be fun to try to rewrite slimp3.pl, and so over the next few days I did.

I sent it back to Sean, who was very appreciative, emailed it out to all the other customers (some of which were already making other changes), and sent me a free SliMP3 as a thank you. This went back and forth between me and a few other folks. We eventually started a SourceForge project for the “SliMP3 Server”, which eventually became SlimServer.

RHM: So ultimately you abandoned the decision to rewrite in C. Why?

DB: Because I thought it would be fun to learn a little Perl. Later on, though, it turned out that a LOT of people know a little Perl and like to use it to solve their immediate problem or try out their latest idea. Perfect for building a community to help build out SlimServer.

RHM: Was the Slimserver designed from the beginning to be extended by a development community, or did you come to that idea later?

DB: It happened organically. Sean’s key insight was that he wasn’t going to be able to do much of the software development, so he got people like me involved. In 2002, I joined Slim Devices (employee #2) and could work full-time on the project, helping the community do the interesting work.

RHM: Is there a value to contributing if you don’t actually purchase a Slim Device product? In other words, are most of your developers and contributors also customers?

DB: Yes, they are, but there are a substantial number of SlimServer users who haven’t bought the product yet. They just want to stream their music to their PCs, using SoftSqueeze or WinAmp or the like. There’s utility in the software without the hardware, plus it’s a great way to “try before you buy”.

RHM: What percentage of the Slimserver code base, by your very rough estimation, was written by employees of Slim Devices?

DB: That’s a hard question. Some of those folks started writing stuff before they became employees or contractors here. I’d guess that it’s probably half.

RHM: As you’ve increased your staff, have many people been hired out of the development/user community?

DB: Yes. For example, Dan Sully is now our lead SlimServer developer; he was one of our earliest customers and is a major Perl guru. Richard Titmuss was a customer, wrote SoftSqueeze (a java-based Squeezebox simulator) and is now our lead firmware engineer. And we’re hoping to hire more.

RHM: How many of the plug-ins developed by the community have made their way into the product itself, and how are they maintained? By the community? By folks from the company with community help?

DB: We include about 27 plug-ins in the current SlimServer release. Most of those have come from the community and are maintained as a group effort. There are also a number of HTML skins and a lot of core functionality that’s originated in the community. The ultimate responsibility for the quality of the product belongs to Slim Devices, but help comes from all over.

RHM: What are the mechanisms for community contribution? Do community developers have CVS/SVN access, or do they just email patches to a list, or what?

DB: Both. The SVN repository is open to the world for reading. We qualify folks before they get write access and there are about a dozen who have that power. Folks who don’t have write access post to the forums, set up their own web page and link from our Wiki, attach patches to bugs in our bug system, or just send them to somebody who has access.

RHM: Do you have any specific success stories of work done by community members that has made a huge difference to you?

DB: Sure. One big one is that a customer in Japan really wanted Japanese fonts on his player. He rolled up his sleeves and figured out a way to get a font renderer to work with TrueType fonts very easily. It’s something that was on our to-do list for a long time — but nobody on our internal team needed it like this fellow did. So he went out and solved the problem for himself and made the product better for folks all over the world.

Another example is the AlienBBC plugin. Our customers in the UK really wanted to get access to their favorite BBC stations. They organized themselves and wrote a comprehensive plug-in that does that and a whole lot more. This is one of our most popular plugins and provides access to a huge number of radio stations that we wouldn’t have been able to provide otherwise.

RHM: What impact would you say that your development community has had on the success of Slim Devices as a company?

DB: It’s not just code that the development community creates that makes a difference. Our discussion forums guide the direction of the hardware and software development. Our wiki and bug system are open to the public and help us document and maintain our products. Our users evangelize our products to the world and help us meet interesting partners for content relationships — like Pandora.

We wouldn’t be here without them.

When I first wanted to write about guitar tablature, I’d intended it as a feature about the Online Guitar Archive (OLGA) and the community that has grown around the site. But in the week that I began researching, OLGA went offline. That’s when it became a different story. You can read what happened here.

I started playing guitar when I was six and took lessons until I was 15. I stopped playing three lessons after I backed our pickup truck into my guitar teacher’s car. Learning to play the guitar suddenly became a lot less important than learning how to drive.

Until about 18 months ago when watching my 15-year-old nephew shred AC/DC riffs with my old guitar reminded me how much I used to enjoy playing. So I started again, but after a few days I’d exhausted the short list of songs I remembered how to play. Somehow “More than Words” and “Bad Medicine” haven’t quite held on to their late-80s street cred.

Just when I was ready to push the guitar back under the bed, I did a Google search for “Radiohead” and “guitar” and found OLGA.

Which brings me to the irony of the publishing industry shutting down these sites.

In the time that I’ve been playing again, I have become a very good sheet music customer. I’ve bought a stack of books and magazines, some songbooks, some instructional, all with the official, authorized versions of songs–none of which I’d have purchased if not for inspiration from OLGA. Not one.

So in my experience, OLGA didn’t replace sheet music sales, it created them.

Which begs the question. Was OLGA creating a market bigger than the one it was claimed to be taking away? Guitar sales are at an all-time high in the UK. And here in the US, superstores like Guitar Center are raking in profits. Two years ago I wouldn’t have bothered to walk in a guitar store, now I do it every weekend.

Of course my experience may be unique. It is possible that tab sites are taking money away from artists, songwriters, and the organizations that support them. In all seriousness, no one wants that to happen. I love music. I buy CDs, go to live shows, take home t-shirts. And I want the people who write and perform my favorite music to get paid for it. Otherwise they might stop.

But I can’t help but wonder what would happen if the tab sites were allowed to peacefully co-exist in a world with real sheet music. To consider these sites as simplified, community-generated, typically incomplete or even incorrect versions of these songs. Like sheet music training wheels.

It’s easy to appreciate the quality of accurate and professionally transcribed sheet music. Guitar players know there’s a big difference between the quality and completeness of songs on the free tab sites and the ones you buy in books. (Assuming the free versions weren’t copied directly from the sheet music.)

Guitarists also know the number of songs that have been officially transcribed is small and generally limited to mainstream music. I can’t imagine a song from a local indie band will ever be worth a professional transcriber’s time. So why not make a business out of it. Let the community tab, and find a way for the artists to get paid. Whether through advertising, subscriptions, whatever.

The law is the law. And while the music publishing industry may claim copyright infringement, and they may succeed in that claim, especially when the lyrics are involved–I can’t help but wonder if they’re missing a bigger opportunity.

In the same way that they tried to stop sheet music sales. Or railed against the cassette mix tape. Or when former Motion Picture Association President Jack Valenti said the “VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”

This industry is one that historically resists change, is ultimately is forced to evolve, only to find themselves in a market more lucrative than the one it started with. Now might be the time to try evolving.

Pioneering musicians have been releasing music into the Creative Commons since the first versions of these licenses were first developed almost four years ago. In the early days, it wasn’t easy to find this new “open source music”; persistent Google searches would turn up pockets of music here and there, but it took real dedication to find music under a Creative Commons license. And when you did, honestly, a lot of it wasn’t very good.

But now some leaders are emerging in the open music world. There’s ccMixter, a site that provides tools that allow musicians to remix free music. There’s freesound, which provides raw materials for the creation of open music. And there’s Magnatune, which applies Creative Commons licensing to the traditional record label model.

The growing star in this space, though, is Jamendo. The folks behind Jamendo have put together a lot of the key pieces: Creative Commons licensing, no Digital Rights Management (DRM), MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats, an easy way for new musicians to upload their work, streaming audio for low-fi and peer-to-peer delivery for hi-fi, a web site in multiple languages, and a strong global community of listeners who can easily express their opinions. It’s the ideal “long tail” for free music. The result: explosive growth.

We recently spoke with Laurent Kratz, the CEO and co-founder of Jamendo, to learn more about their vision.

RHM: What led you to start Jamendo?

Laurent: During summer 2004, Sylvain (Zimmer, CTO and co-founder) came up with the initial idea: Basically, to build a professional service that would help amateur and unsigned bands push themselves “voluntarily” into the most popular peer-to-peer networks, which are by far the biggest music platforms in the world.

We use BitTorrent and eMule (ed2k and Kadmelia) networks as the core technology to distribute more than 1,600 complete albums, at very low cost. We’ve delivered at least 1 million copies this year to date. Artists upload 5 to 10 new albums per day.

We knew we wanted the music to be discovered, copied, and shared without controls, which is why the music is released in both Ogg and MP3 formats, without any DRM. In order to do it legally, we had to use a suitable legal framework; therefore, when artists join Jamendo, they must choose one of the six main Creative Commons licenses.

RHM: One of the biggest questions around both free software and free content is money. How does Jamendo make money? How does Jamendo help artists make money?

Laurent: Jamendo sells advertising space on the jamendo.com web site and in the low-fi streamed music. We guarantee the hi-fi “peer-to-peer” music to be ad-free. This revenue helps us covering the bandwidth cost.

Jamendo also handles PayPal® accounts for the artists. Listeners, if they want to support the artists, pay a minimum amount of five euros. Jamendo only keeps 50 cents, whatever the amount paid by the donor. The money is transferred to the artist once 100 euros are reached. Today we have 5 to 10 payments per day, and every month we pay some artists.

Jamendo drives lots of traffic to the artist’s official web site as well, which helps to sell more physical CDs (if the artist sells CDs from their web site). Also, Jamendo’s blogging capabilities help artists to spread in the blogosphere.

Finally, we are developing more tools to distribute Creative Commons music commercially. The revenue split will be somewhere around 80/20, with 80 for the artist.

RHM: Your growth rates are impressive, but it appears as though your strongest community is still the French-language community. How do you plan to expand your presence globally?

Laurent: Even if we are based in Luxembourg, the founders are French. In 2005, the French parliament had to apply the EU Copyright Directive to French law. Jamendo is free, unlimited, legal, without DRM, and based on the most popular peer-to-peer tools. That was interesting enough for big media in France, and we received a lot of coverage.

Jamendo now receives albums from most of the European countries. Our site is translated into English, Spanish, German and French, and community translation efforts are ongoing in Czech, Polish, Italian, and Portuguese.

To expand our presence we have to do more press releases in more countries. We recently had an article published in Spiegel Online in Germany. We hope that being covered in Red Hat Magazine will help, too.

RHM: What can people do to help spread free music?

Laurent: First of all, listen and share! The music on Jamendo is surprisingly good; you’ll find good albums in almost all genres. Spread the music you discover on blogs and forums. Encourage friends and colleagues to listen to free music.

For developers, we have documented a web services API, which helps to “mash up” the content from Jamendo. Parts of Jamendo’s software are published on sourceforge, and they are licensed under the GPL.

Contributors have already developed some features like a Firefox search extension. We hope that our API will enable developers to spread Jamendo’s music, particularly for media players that use the Ogg Vorbis format. Some good candidates would be plug-ins for amarok, xmms, rythmbox, etc.

I never promised you a rose garden–that was somebody else. However, I have just succeeded in making my laptop an Audio and MIDI workstation using Rosegarden, and I managed to do it all this morning, just before lunchtime. If that sounds promising, read on.

Linux has been a fantastic platform for all sorts of really cool projects, products, and applications, from web serving and web services to genomic sequencing and cataloging to embedded systems development and deployment to all manner of systems monitoring and modeling from the subatomic to the supergalactic. In other areas, such as audio, video, and 3D graphics, Linux has been handicapped, which is a shame, because the content world needs innovation just as much as the scientific, medical, communications, and information systems worlds do. Nevertheless, some courageous people have shown their commitment to ensuring that software freedom is available to those who wish to compose and play, not only those content to read and hack.

In February 2003, the British publication Sound on Sound gave a
very positive review of the AGNULA project, which I first saw demonstrated in Paris the previous year. In that article, Daniel James wrote:

The AGNULA project is creating what is possibly the first computer system tailored specifically for musicians — and it’s all based around the Linux operating system.

And props to him for researching, publishing, and referencing www.gnu.org in an article aimed at music professionals (i.e., people who spend, or at least dream of spending, thousands of Great British Pounds on little things like microphones, preamps, equalizers, mixing boards, A-to-D convertors, D-to-A convertors, etc.).

When I first saw AGNULA, I enthusiastically asked the French engineers who had put it together to give me a demonstration of the software–maybe I could run it at home. They answered in the negative: "we wrote the software but we don’t really know how to use it because we’re hackers, not musicians." Sigh.

If I had been unhappy with my job, it would have been a perfect opportunity to roll up my sleeves and try to bring some experience to the problem. But I loved my job and knew that I could not devote the time it would take to make a real impact.

One challenge with the AGNULA project was that in late 2002 there was no general purpose Linux distribution that had low enough latency to run serious audio applications. Such applications must be able to read, process, mix, and output dozens of audio tracks without dropping one of the 88,200 16-bit samples per second that’s required to make CD-quality stereo sound, or without dropping one of the 96,000 or 192,000 24-bit samples per second that’s required to make DVD-quality sound. (Or, put another way, a one millisecond hiccup could leave nearly 88 samples of stereo CD audio lying on the ground or drop over 500 samples of DVD surround audio.) At that time there were some competing attempts to achieve a low-latency kernel: Robert Love’s premption patches and Andrew Morton and Ingo Molnar’s "low latency" patches. None were upstream, though, and each had vociferous detractors. A core tenet of the AGNULA project was that they would apply technical force to whatever happened to be the operative issue, be it the audio framework, the audio applications, the device drivers, the driver layer, or the Linux kernel itself.This approach was open source at its best, but it also meant that observers needed dedicated hardware to follow the project, because there was no telling what an experimental kernel could do to one’s system.

A challenge I myself faced was that the AGNULA project chose to favor distributions and toolkits that were not, as a Red Hat
executive and user, natural to me. I don’t fault them for making the decisions they did, but it meant that it would be very difficult for me to "watch" the AGNULA project they way I could "watch" other projects that were packaged and tested on Red Hat.

So I watched the AGNULA project from afar, and I watched as other audio applications began to take root and flower. One of these was Rosegarden, a UNIX-based sequencer that predated Linux, but which benefited tremendously by the rapid growth of the Linux audio community. In the same article that introduced AGNULA, Rosegarden provided the lead screenshot and this introduction:

Rosegarden is a MIDI + Audio sequencer which includes notation and audio editing. Version 4 [which is now 4-1.2.3 --
editor] is probably the closest native equivalent to Cubase for Linux, and has recently been released as a beta after two years of active development.

The comparison to Steinberg’s Cubase is intended as very high praise, as Cubase has a very loyal following among its users. The article continues:

Software engineer and musician Richard Bown comes from London, and is one of the lead developers on the Rosegarden project. He’s been working on Rosegarden over the last seven years, but until recently he still needed to use Windows or a Mac to record and produce his music. While making his last album, Richard wondered if Rosegarden would one day allow him to do the same on Linux, and now believes it can.

Well, it’s now about three years after that prediction was made, and the good news is that as of June 2006, it’s bog-easy to set things up on an FC5 laptop and prove it for yourself.

And, it is timely, too. When Apple announced that they’d be dropping the PowerPC processor and switching to Intel, I knew this would mean that many thousands of music production professionals would be reevaluating their hardware platform of choice for audio recording, mixing, and mastering. I saw more and more people starting to talk about Linux in professional audio newsgroups. When I attended FISL 7 in Porto Alegre earlier this year I bumped into Georg Greve (of the FSF Europe) and talked about AGNULA, its progress, and the prospect of making Fedora a first-rate platform for free audio software. But what really told me we had reached critical mass was when I saw Greg De Koenigsberg flipping through the audio products catalog of a major mail-order house trying to decide which micrphones to buy for a new podcasting studio we’re setting up in Raleigh. He told me that there were now yum-based repositories for Rosegarden and other audio software. I was ready to try it out for myself.

Installation of Planet CCRMA

The first stop is either the Rosegarden site itself or the first place to which it directs Fedora users, Planet CCRMA (pronounced cc:Karma). Planet CCRMA has basically become the home for the forked low-latency kernels needed to run audio applications as well as RPM packages of those applications themselves. Now until FC5, these kernels and packages were not for the faint-of-heart. But with FC5, and with a lot of good merging work that was completed in early June, it appears that audio on Linux is ready to become a mainstream feature.

The instructions for installing on FC5 are here and begin with the reassuring promise: "Installing Planet CCRMA is easy."

Here are the steps, adapted from Planet CCRMA page:

1. Install FC5.

2. Install the GPG signature key for
   Planet CCRMA.

3. Configure Yum to include the
   Planet CCRMA repos.

4. Synchronize with the repository.

5. Install the low-latency kernel
   (not as scary as it used to be).

6. Reboot and make sure everything’s
   happy.

7. Configure soundcards (which was
   automatic for my T41 Thinkpad).

8. Update FC5 to the latest.

9. Tune the system (which I haven’t
   yet done, but might in future if needed).

10. Install some applications: yum install qjackctl fluidsyth fluid-soundfont qsynth rosegarden4 should do the trick. A repository view of these applications can be found here but I prefer to follow the "Applications/Multimedia" link to this location.

11. Adjust your volume (make sure that PCM Playback is enabled) using System->Preferences->Volume Control from the main GNOME menubar. (n.b.: If you are using an IBM T41 Thinkpad like I am, you may have to also ensure that the sound is not muted or over- or under-amplified via the audio hotkeys in the upper left hand side of the keyboard. It boggles my mind that there are two completely independent mechanisms for muting audio and that one is invisible to the other, but there you have it.)

Working with the audio applications

Now we’re ready to rock! To play MIDI, we need a MIDI file. I’m using this one, but you can use anything you like.

Step One: Start jack. Jack is an acronym for "jack audio connection kit." The jack server is the
application that allows all of the other audio applications to talk with one another, which is why it must be started first, as follows:

qjackctl -s &

Make sure jack is active by clicking the green "start" arrow if it hasn’t started by default.

Under Settings, I prefer to change the sample rate from 48000 to 44100. Isn’t 48000 higher quality than 44100? Well, if you are ultimately trying to create audio for CD, doing everything in 44100 is going to save you from sample-conversion errors later in the process, and it will take less CPU power, space on disk, etc. If you are making content for DVD distribution, stick with 48000. But trust me, if CD is your target, don’t waste your time and confuse yourself with a non-native sample rate (unless it’s 88.2K, 2x the 44.1K rate).

Step Two: Start fluidsynth via qsynth. Qsynth is the synthesizer application that generates tones based on the midi data it receives, and the fluidsynth soundfonts determine what those tones will sound like. Start qsynth as follows:

qsynth -r 44100 &

The click the "Setup" button. Under the MIDI tab, change "ALSA Sequencer Client ID" from ‘pid’ to ‘Qsynth1′. Under the Soundfonts tab, load the fluidsynth soundfonts. By default they install as /usr/share/soundfonts/FluidR3_GM.SF2, so open that file.

Step Three: start your sequencer and play a MIDI file. Now you’re ready to start rosegarden, as follows:

rosegarden &

Next, open Manage MIDI Devices and make sure that ‘General MIDI Device’ is connected to ‘Synth input port (Qsynth1:0)’. The
connection number should be NNN:0 (where NNN is some number between 128 and 255).

Finally, import a MIDI file using File->Import, and hit the "Play" button is Rosegarden. You should hear qsynth
rendering music to your speakers!

Step Four: Patch Jack for Audio Production.
Now, to really prove that we know what we’re doing, let’s record the output of the softsyth so that we can produce an actual audio file. Such a file can be encoded into ogg format, uploaded to your favorite portable media player and enjoyed while your laptop recharges.

In the Jack window, open up the Connections window by pressing the Connect button. Connect the qsynth ‘left’ output to the
rosegarden ‘record in 1 L’ input. Similarly, connect the qsynth ‘right’ output to the rosegarden ‘record in 1 R’ input. Connections are made by selecting the output and input and then pressing the ‘Connect’ button (no need to shift-click).

Step Five: Render MIDI to Audio. This is where we create the actual audio file. In rosegarden…

1. Add a track by doing
   Tracks->Add Track.

2. Change the track to an Audio
   track using RMB->Audio and then select an audio track (such as
   ‘audio #1′).

3. Label the track.
   Double-click the label and replace it with a
   sensible track name.

4. Rosegarden needs to
   associate the audio track with an audio file. Using
   Composition->Edit Document Properties, select the Audio tab and
   choose an audio path. All your audio files will be stored in this
   directory.

5. Click on the LED next to the
   audio track name; it should turn red when ready to record. If you’ve
   selected a non-existent directory, rosegarden will refuse to record
   until you fix this.

6. Now, press the big red record button in rosegarden (no
   need to try to press play and record at the same time) and the audio
   track should turn red and grow as the music plays. When you’ve
   recorded enough, press stop. The audio track should turn green and a
   rendering of the soundwaves should appear.

If your levels are good, you should see something nice and spikey. If it looks like a black 2-by-4, it means you’re clipping
because your levels are too high, and that’s going to sound bad. If your levels are too low, you won’t have any sound waves getting near the edges of the audio file–which will also affect sound quality, especially at 16 bits per sample (less so for 24-bit and 32-bit samples). If you forgot Step Four, you’ll just have a flat line, indicating you’ve recorded digital silence.

But this is just the beginning. You can connect a microphone and sample the dog. You can connect a keyboard and create your own MIDI files. You can connect external sound devices such as the Buchla200e and create your own slice of analog heaven. And you can add plugins and effects.

Bugs and limitations

The fluidsynth-dssi package was promising, but its interface needs a few simple fixes. Software synthesizers need to know where to find their sound libraries. qsynth uses a proper file selection dialog box that accepts a directory name as a file name and then prompts from that directory. Thus it’s easy to enter /usr/share/soundfonts/ and then pick the SF2 file you want. The dssi plugin uses a file selector widget that requres one to find this file the hard way: up to root, down to user, down to share, down to soundfonts (which is a pain since I have 238 entries in /usr/share) and then finally to the SF2 file. I could try to enter the whole path manually, but for a 16-track General MIDI file, that’s a lot of typing, times 16! Worse, the dssi plugin doesn’t respond to MIDI program change events, which means that I have to manually select the program file I want for each of the 16 tracks. Mousing through 256 selections times 16, when the patch info is already embedded in the MIDI file adds insult to injury. I’m sure this is just a mere matter of programming to fix.

It should also be noted that fluidsynth is not very smart when it comes to memory management: it loads the entire
soundfont into memory whether one is using one patch or 16 (the typical maximum for MIDI). This is a problem for laptops limited to 512 MB of RAM: qsynth happily consumes over 200 MB of RAM just loading the default soundfont! Can somebody please make this "load-on-demand"?

While I’m talking about "nice to haves"… it should be possible to start these apps up in any order and for the
servers and clients to all find each other by magic, but it doesn’t work that way, at least not yet. Instead, I have to start jack first, then qsynth, then rosegarden, and this causes the right connections to happen in the right order with the right defaults (mostly). It would be cool if, when starting jack, jack could notice that there’s a rosegarden running and sync with it. I imagine that this becomes even more important when plugins are involved. Programs I’m familiar with on the Macintosh platform go through a process of discovery upon startup, registering all possible plugins ahead of time so that they can be launched and managed from within the main sequencer application. As far as I can tell with Rosegarden, you have to know ahead of time what you’re going to use, and bring it up or you won’t be able to find it. Of course Rosegarden does let you save your work, so perhaps things will be easier when you come back to your work, but it would be nice if everything "just worked" from the beginning.

Finally, you should not forget that "workstation" is a code word meaning "benefits from as much screen real estate as you can afford". On my 1024×768 laptop, I definitely feel cramped. But having this cool software working so well so easily is powerful encouragement to think about upgrading my hardware to at least 1280×1024 or beyond.

About the author

Michael Tiemann’s first musical experience with computers was in 1974, when his father brought home "The Flight of the Bumblebee" encoded on paper tape and played it on an IMSAI 8080 computer running 4K BASIC. That was also the year his
family bought a copy of "The Copper Plated Integrated Circuit", a seminal album of classic and modern music rendered on a Moog synthesizer. Michael then studied classical guitar for eight years, largely forgetting about the music/computer relationship until he founded Cygnus Support, and E-mu Systems became a GNUPro customer. He started buying all kinds of music toys, only to have them all stolen while he was promoting free software in Europe. He again put music on the back shelf until 2002, when he heard about the AGNULA project. Michael is delighted to see companies like Korg and Midas highlighting their use of Linux as the basis of their respective flagship products, and looks forward to the day when he can share music code and content as freely as he does other code and content.