Ubuntu Studio 9.10

Shortly after I burned my first ISO of PCLinuxOS, I configured my first serious desktop with a dual boot of Ubuntu Studio 8.04 and XP. As I recall I had many growing pains configuring my audio with UbuStu, however, at some point I was successful and was able to recompose a song I wrote in high-school using Rosegarden.

At some point, I decided to upgrade to UbuStu-9.04 as I had been enjoying the usability of Ubuntu-9.04 (Jaunty) and 9.10 (Karmic) at school. Sadly, I had some major issues with this install that forced me to move to Ubuntu-9.10. I knew I would probably try UbuStu-9.10 when it was released with the hope that the earlier incompatibility would be corrected. It seemed to work okay, however I could not get it to work with my Ralink Wirless card. Also, I was frustrated that the UbuStu developers didn't include some of the slick upgrades (namely the Ubuntu Software Center) that is steadily improving the usability of Ubuntu. I had no way of accessing the web without "ruining my life" so I moved on to 9.10 and decided to go on a significant "shopping spree." I installed loads of science, education and music apps from the Software Center, as well as the kernel-rt from synaptic.

The most significant challenge was getting the JACK audio server to run and I eventually found that I had to add my user to the "audio" and "pulse" groups under System -> Administration -> Users and Groups. The follwing URLs were helpful for me:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=600626
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1336078
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=453486

and most significantly:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1143784

I still get the following error from Rosegarden however:

System timer resolution is too low
Rosegarden was unable to find a high-resolution timing source for MIDI performance.
You may be able to solve this problem by loading the RTC timer kernel module. To do this, try running sudo modprobe snd-rtctimer in a terminal window and then restarting Rosegarden.
Alternatively, check whether your Linux distributor provides a multimedia-optimized kernel. See http://rosegarden.wiki.sourceforge.net/Low+latency+kernels for notes about this.

Reproducing My First Masterpiece

When I was in High School, I took a music theory class with Bruce McCormick.  He was an inspiration to every single student that had an appreciation of music and one of the hardest working teachers I've ever had the pleasure of knowing.  This class spurred me to compose a 111 measure 5-part piece for voice...but with no lyrics.  I spent many hours at a macintosh computer using software called Nightingale and entering notes with an attached MIDI keyboard.  Upon completion, I assembled a group of vocalists to perform the piece at the annual spring concert my senior year.  It was a significant highlight and achievement in my life.  There was a poor quality video recording of the event but I do not posses a copy and I never made a synth recording or even saved an electronic record of the piece (not that I would be able to find a computer that could access it today since I believe Nightingale is no longer in use anywhere).  For a decade now I have retained a single hard copy of the music and I am frankly amazed that it has survived the 5 times I have moved in 10 years.  Regardless, I've always wanted to reproduce the electronic copy so that I could at last hear the piece again.  Finally with my UbStu Linux distro I have that opportunity!

Of all the various sequencers and recorders and notation editors I have come across so far, I'm most impressed with the completeness of Rosegarden.  This software is incredible especially considering it is free!  I have vowed to contribute to the authors as soon as I make some significant advancement in utilizing it to its greater potential...and as soon as I graduate and get a job.

Rosegarden runs on top of the Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) which is still a bit mysterious to me.  The learning curve on Rosegarden has also been somewhat steep and I've spent close to 3 hours just in combing though the manual and Michael McIntyre's very useful on-line tutorial.  I'm nearly half way through inputting my 'masterpiece' (I've yet to give it an appropriate name but had originally named it "Fortune Cookie") using the notation editor and so far I've figured out how to assign each track a synth sound from pre-existing libraries so I need only my computer's sound-card (Sound Blaster Audigy).

At this point I've spent a couple-few hours trying to figure out how to record my piece without success.  I would like to be able to just use my computer's sound-card without any additional external components/keyboards/etc.  It seems from the tutorial that this should be possible but it is not carefully described here so I will need to start search for information elsewhere very soon.