Switching Qs: Sequencers, Colors, HW Compatibility

Veli-Pekka Tätilä vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi
Thu Feb 15 22:31:10 GMT 2007


Luke Yelavich wrote:
On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 10:30:32PM EST, Veli-Pekka Tätilä wrote:
<snip>
>> just popped in the Edgy live CD in my main music machine and wonder of
>> wonders it came up with Orca right after the boot. This is the first time
>> a LInux distro has recognized my TerraTec EWS88 MT soundcard. <snipped 
>> myself>
>since you are using such a high-end sound card, you may have problems with 
>synthesized speech, since it is played
>at lower sample rates, and I have found with my envy24 based hardware,
>it takes a while for audio to be heard.
Hmm the repercussions here can be quite bad. So if I'd liek to make sure 
Gnome sound effects or speech won't interfere with CD quality audio 
playbakc, I should turn them off or maybe use a separate sound card. 
Actually the TerraTec EWS88 MT has a physically different card for system 
sounds called the System Wave output in the TerraTEc drivers in Windows. 
That would be the ideal choice. Not sure how Linux recognizes that card, 
though. It is separate from the breakout box.

How good is LInux at software resampling? ONe of my hardware synths actually 
uses a 48 kHz sampling rate so I've locked my Terratec to that using its 
Windows control panel. It is smart enough to up-sample everything to 48 kHz 
and will never down sample which is kinda nice. Is there anything like this 
in the ENvy24 drivers in LInux?

Incidentally that LInux friend of mine who I mentioned also has an envy24 
based card and he has been complaining about latency as well. That would be 
bad if I would use soft synths or real time effects. I've got enough 
hardware for basic mixing but again if the OS can do flawless low-latency 
audio with say 5 ms or less, that would be great.

>> 1. Is eSpeak already included in Edgy and if it is how do I enable 
>> Finnish
>> support and also make it show in the Orca list of speech synths?
>Espeak is unfortunately not on the Live CD. It is in the universe
I see, based on other comments in this thread it seems I'd better wait for 
the next release then. No problem really, because I haven't done anything 
major yet. After I had discovered how well ORca does seem to work in Gnome, 
the thought of giving LInux another try occurred to me. The only thing I've 
lost so far is one CD I'd have burned anyway and besides the thing does work 
much better than I expected. I've gained useful Linux knowledge, too, both 
here on the list and in tweaking Gnome.

>> 2. Is there a decent, accessible MIDI sequencer for Gnome out there? 
>> NOthing
>> fancy, multiple tracks, event list, quantize with a strength parameter 
>> and
>> the ability to support several hardware MIDi synths with instrument names
>> would be good enough.
>Unfortunately, there isn't. While there are some great Linux audio apps,
>accessibility is not their strong point.
Well, the same thing in Mac or WIndows. I routinely come across plugs with 
no concept of keyboard focus or tab order, bitmapped text that makes no 
sense to the AT and a zillion other annoyances. Just recently I've 
discovered that some VSt hosts eat alt and ctrl+tab keystrokes so it is hard 
to even develop a good standard:ish keybord interface.

>There is one GTK sequencer called Seq24, but without having tried it
>myself, I can't say how accessible it is.
I've heard of some Linux seequencers before. I already mentioned Ardour 2 
will be GTK based and is going to have MIDI so that's one promissing 
development. Others I've heard of include Rose Garden and Jazz++. Are these 
two any good in terms of accessibility and features? I've just learned WX 
Widgets can use almost any underlying GUI framework so if either of them 
uses GTK via WX Widgets, chances are these apps just might be accessible.

>> couple of questions I have regarding the visuals. firstly, how should I 
>> set
>> up the magnifier screen coordinates in Orca to get a wide, rectangular
>> window at the bottom of the screen similar to a docked Microsoft 
>> Magnifier,
>Orca should have options in its preferences for adjusting magnification
It does, but apparently these are direct screen coordinates of the for 
corners making up the magnified rectangle. Any other magnifier's  I've seen 
allow drag and drop with the mouse or if that's difficult some offer a 
real-time resize interface from the keyboard. Orca's current method seems a 
bit archaic, oh well. But then again, maybe I just don't know the shortcuts.

>> Secondly, and this is a long pet-pieve of mine, is there still no 
>> graphical
>> way of seting up the colors in a Gnome theme? I like how KDE does it
>> immensly but too bad QT4 support isn't mainstream just yet. I've tried a
>> couple of times to find out official docs or an easy tutorial of how the
>> theme files need to be modified to simply change some of the background
>> colors but haven't been succesful so far.
>I'll have to leave this question to be answered by those more
>knowledgable about how GNOME themes are created. Daniel, anybody else?
Yes, I'd like to see some guidelines in this regard. I've yet to find a 
basic howto or tutorial on the subject. Well, I guess this reflects the 
differences in the average Gnome and KDE useres, at least partially. KDe 
folks seem to be more into customization. Unfortunately that sighted LInux 
friend of mine is a die-hard KDE user so he cannot help with Gnome software 
that much.

>> 4. Finally, how do I determin for sure whether a piece of hardware is
>> compatible with Ubuntu.
>I think there is, but once again, I will have to defer to others to
>point to it.
OK, no problem. I'll Google, which I should have done before posting, too.

>> In particular, I'd need to be sure that my M-Audio (formerly MIDIman) USB
>> MIDI Sport 4x4 as well as its 1x1 counter part do work in Linux.
>I am pretty sure that the MIDI controller is supported, but you can go
>to the ALSA website, http://www.alsa-project.org, <snip>
Will do that, thanks.

>I hope I have been of some help. If you have any more questions, pleaes
Most definitely, once again thanks for replying.
It's great to get some definite answers.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/ 




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