[PlanetCCRMA] Newbie needs help with Configuring sound in RH8.0

[Angel de Vicente]

Hi,

the other day I went to the CCRMA web site and decided to follow the
instructions there so that I could install Rosegarden in my laptop.

I had no trouble with any part of the installation. I have RH8.0 running in an
IMB Thinkpad 600, 298MB of RAM, Pentium II at 400MHz. I installed apt,
etc. updated the whole system and downloaded and installed all the software in
the CCRMA package.

Now, the sound card seems to be working OK, as I can now listen to music through
xmms with no problems. I can also run Rosegarden, but here I have only a partial
success, and I think I need some guidance. I get two different situations, and
none of them ideal:

1) I run timidity, so that I can use Rosegarden to write music, but also to
   listen to it right in my computer, but then the results are really poor. The
   quality of the sound is OK, but the rythm is not, it sometimes goes faster
   than it should, other times slower....

2) I try to run fluidsynth instead. I download some soundfonts from hammersound,
   I run fluidsynth -m alsa_seq somefonts.sf2 and these get loaded OK. Then I
   try to listen to the music coming from the computer, but the sound has a lot
   of noise in it (I tried with two different soundfonts, just in case this
   could be the problem, but both of them behave similarly).

Now, I don't know if these problems are unavoidable given the poor machine I'm
trying to run Rosegarden in, so I would appreciate if you could point me to some
basic information about performance, requirements, etc. Concretely, I think I
would need to know:

1) Is such a machine (in principle) able to run rosegarden with a software
   synthesizer successfully?

2) I've read something about jackd, which I have installed, but I don't know
   what it is, whether it is supposed to be running or not, etc.

3) When I'm running Rosegarden and successfully listening to music (though with
   noise or out of rhythm, I see the processes running in my machine, and I see
   that arTs is running as well. Does need this to be running? I tried to kill
   it, but then I got no sound.

As you can see, I'm a bit lost here. Any light on the subject will be greatly
appreciated (I really want an accompaniment when I practice the guitar at home).

Thanks,
Angel de Vicente
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http://www.iac.es/galeria/angelv/

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