I know I announced last month that I'd be reviewing Jesse Chappell's Sooper Looper in this column, but to be honest, I've been sidetracked. Fortunately, my diversions have provided the material for this month's column, so here we go with Dave's Distractions for August 2005.

I confess that this is the latest distraction, but it's already got me avoiding other necessary tasks. D. Michael McIntyre has been writing The Rosegarden Companion for two years, and it's easy to tell that it's been a labor of love. The author's presentation style is informal and friendly, and he definitely is knowledgeable about his subject. For those of you don't know about Rosegarden, it is an integrated audio/MIDI sequencer with advanced features, including extensive system control and impressive notation facilities. The program has been in development since the early 1990s, beginning with a GUI based on the Xaw widget set and coming at last to a beautiful Qt interface. But Rosegarden is not only a pretty face, and McIntyre is an excellent guide to what's behind the program's good looks.

Figure 1. The Rosegarden Companion

The Rosegarden Companion is arranged in nine chapters covering the following aspects of Rosegarden:

After a brief introduction to the program, the author introduces the basics of getting sound from your computer and other gear. The detail of this chapter is necessary: of all the troubles that users have with audio and MIDI under Linux, certainly the worst problems appear right at the start of their explorations. Thirteen pages are devoted to this topic, and still more could be added. However, McIntyre does a fine job of getting the new user up to speed with his sound-producing capabilities, and the next chapter dives into Rosegarden's main interface windows. Rosegarden's design purposely imposes a particular approach to composing with the program. Of course, you can use it any way you find suitable, but you'll probably move along faster in Rosegarden if you pay attention to its basic organization.

The next two chapters deal with the concepts of what Rosegarden calls a "studio" and "instruments". Those chapters naturally lead to a presentation of Rosegarden's various recording modes, followed by a chapter dedicated to the program's various editing modes. Given Rosegarden's excellent music notation capabilities, a separate chapter appears for the notation editor. The main part of the book ends with a chapter on using Rosegarden as a "mastering" tool to put the finishing touches on your recordings. Four brief appendices and an index close The Rosegarden Companion.

So how is it? For the Rosegarden novice, the book is indispensable. It provides a low-key introduction to a complex program, presenting every major feature of the program with just enough explanation to clarify their functions and usage. As we might expect in a book dealing with such a GUI-intensive program, The Rosegarden Companion is heavy on helpful illustrations and screenshots. However, clarifying text has been added to many images, most of which look good, but some are poorly printed and have obscured the text.

The assessment is a little different for a relatively advanced user of Rosegarden. The book avoids technical discourse whenever possible, and its brevity--less than 190 pages--restrains in-depth exploration of the program's features. Synchronization capabilities are ignored, and there is no mention of Rosegarden's ability to export scores to the Csound audio synthesis language. Nevertheless, even advanced users can learn something new and interesting. I now have a much better understanding of the MIDI event editor, and I must say that the chapter on the notation editor is a blessing.

The author attempts to generalize environment issues, but it seems fair to suggest that The Rosegarden Companion will be especially useful for users working with the KDE desktop environment. Users of Fervent Software's Studio To Go! also might realize some advantages using that system's version of Rosegarden along with the book.

The Rosegarden Companion is the first book to be dedicated to a single Linux audio application, and I'd love to see more. At a list price of less than $20US it should be affordable for most users, and it's certainly within the budgets of most libraries. All in all, for price and value I found The Rosegarden Companion to be a most profitable distraction.

Chris Cannam and his crew must be working overtime to make sure my attention is constantly drawn towards their projects. Not only have they been responsible for the awesome Rosegarden and the wonderful Studio To Go! (to be reviewed in a later column), they've also devised the DSSI, the Disposable Software Synthesizer Interface. DSSI can be considered the logical successor to the LADSPA plugin API, a programmer's interface for the creation of effects and other signal processing plugins. Alas, LADSPA was not designed to support the features needed for plugin synthesizers, hence the DSSI.

Figure 2. The DSSI vsthost Running the Crystal VSTi Plugin

The DSSI API is relatively new to the Linux audio development scene, and only a few native DSSI synths have been written. However, the available examples are outstanding, particularly Sean Bolton's Hexter. Hexter models the FM synthesis sound of the Yamaha DX7, loading DX7 patch files--if they're in the correct .syx format--and even accepting DX7 system-exclusive messages for editing patches. As an owner of many Yamaha FM synths, I was skeptical of Hexter's claims, but I must say that Sean's done a terrific job of emulating the crisp, clean sound of my hardware boxes.

Other neat examples of DSSI-savvy software include Sean Bolton's Xsynth, which models the sound of classic analog synthesizers, and Florian Schmidt's dssi-convolve, a DSSI wrapper for his libconvolve convolution effects engine. I hope to see more developers embrace DSSI, and it already has been written into Rosegarden and soon may be available in Werner Schweer's outstanding MusE MIDI sequencer.

Now, you might be wondering how I can claim distraction status for a small handful of plugins, and again I must make a confession: I've really been playing around with the dssi-vst software. Yes, the DSSI interface includes a mechanism to support the use of VST/VSTi plugins under Linux, following and extending a path started upon by Kjetil Matheussen's vstserver and continued with the libfst project from developers Paul Davis and Torben Hohn. The dssi-vst bridge differs from those projects in its ability to be compiled with recent WINE builds. All current support for VST/VSTi plugins under Linux is dependent on WINE, but recent WINE development breaks vstserver and libfst. However, I successfully built and tested the dssi-vst package under wine-20050725, one of the most recent public releases.

I'm still testing the dssi-vst software, but I've already been happy to discover that most of the plugins I ran with the previous projects also run on the dssi-vst bridge. As with the other VST support projects, dssi-vst requires JACK, and Figure 2 shows off the Crystal VSTi synthesizer running in a Debian-based Demudi 1.2.1 environment that includes JACK, operated by QJackCtl in the figure, and a virtual MIDI keyboard. A vast number of VST/VSTi plugins are available, many for free-as-in-beer, so it looks like I'll be busy testing this software for quite some time. Thanks to Chris, Sean, Steve Harris and everyone else working on DSSI for another most profitable distraction.

Recently I decided to clear my laptop's drive and replace its aging Red Hat 9 with a brand new Demudi 1.2.1 Debian system. The Red Hat installation worked fine, it was a Planet CCRMA system, but its 2.4 kernel was growing old. I wanted to step up to the 2.6 series, and I wanted to work in a Debian-based environment. I downloaded the Demudi ISO from the AGNULA Web site, burned it to disc with gcombust, put the disc in the laptop's CD-ROM drive and began the installation process. Booting from the CD was no problem, and the installation process was trouble-free. When I finally saw the handsome Demudi login screen I thought I was ready to rock. I logged in, and my troubles began.

I'm running out of space for this article, so I'll simply cut to the chase and report that 1) Demudi rocks, it's a beautifully designed system and 2) my laptop hardware did not like Demudi 1.2.1 "as is". Through no apparent fault of Demudi, I was forced to compile and reinstall ALSA in order to get the necessary driver modules to install under the Demudi 2.6.12 kernel. All is not perfected out there on the edge, and my aging laptop kicked and struggled all the way to my now-working Debian-based system. The Demudi developers are aware of the problems I encountered and already have made additions to the repositories to expand some aspects of hardware support. Updated kernel and ALSA systems are also in the works, and I'm sure the situation will improve with regards to ancient equipment.

The 2.6.12 kernel itself appears to be the more serious problem, though it's also possible that the new X server from Xorg is not yet fully optimized for my funky video chipset, the NM256, same as my soundchip. However, debugging the system at this level is beyond my means, both in abilities and time, so I'll either reinstall a Red Hat system on the laptop and install Demudi on my desktop machine, whose hardware is far more Linux-friendly, or I'll wait a little longer and see what Free Ekayanaka comes up with for the next release of Demudi.

By the way, potential users should not be deterred by my experience reported here. Demudi is also available as a live CD, enabling users to test the system without installing it. I advise testing your system's friendliness towards Demudi by checking out its live CD first, installing only after you're certain that your hardware is supported. More modern machines seem to have little or no trouble with the system, but if you're at all concerned with problematic hardware, check out the live CD first.

Yes, another book, and yes, it's another book about sound software that runs on Linux. However, this one is a more general text that explores the world of computer-assisted music composition by way of Rick Taube's amazing Common Music. I've mentioned Common Music in previous articles; it's a Lisp-based language with a set of remarkable sound and music elements. Common Music has been in consistent development for many years, and it currently includes amenities such as real-time output and a GUI for selecting and configuring its targets. Common Music creates files and streams for MIDI, with real-time support from MidiShare or PortMIDI; software sound synthesis languages such as Csound and Common Lisp Music; and notation systems such as Common Music Notation and the more recent FOMUS system.

Figure 3. Notes from the Metalevel

Notes from the Metalevel is Rick Taube's extended treatise on composing with the computer. It covers an incredible amount of material, some of which is rather complicated to understand, but the author maintains a consistently engaging writing style throughout. Difficult things are explained clearly, and the author has supplied hundreds of examples and projects, all of which are available on the accompanying CD. The disc also includes complete Common Music systems for Linux, Mac and Windows, making it a simple matter to read the book with hands on the described software.

Alas, I'm out of space and simply advise the interested reader to buy and study this book. Unfortunately, the softcover edition has a list price of $54.95 (US), but I must point out that the book is 338 pages long and includes the CD described above. I realize the price is perhaps a bit high, but I honestly recommend it as being worth every penny, or whatever currency you prefer. I carry Notes from the Metalevel with me at all times, there's so much to learn from it. And in my daily life, it has become a permanent and always welcome distraction.

So now you know why I didn't review Jesse's Sooper Looper. If I can stay on track, I'll cover it next month. Meanwhile I must excuse myself, I have some books I want to read, some plugins to test and some music to write. Gotta go, see you next month !

PS: Electronic music pioneer Robert Moog passed from this mortal coil on August 21, 2005. He was a true giant in the history of 20th century music technology, and while he will be greatly missed on this plane I can only imagine that he's already improving the music of the spheres. RIP Bob Moog, all blessings upon him and his family.

The Rosegarden Companion

DSSI (Disposable Software Synthesizer Interface)

AGNULA/Demudi

Notes from the Metalevel

Caring Bridge guestbook for Robert Moog