[ubuntu-marketing] Sheffield University music department switching to Ubuntu Studio

[Toby Smithe]

Hi Chris,

This is excellent to hear! I have forwarded your mail to the Ubuntu
Studio Users' list, and I invite you to participate in the discussion
that'll undoubtedly emerge there.

I'm very pleased to see that Ubuntu Studio is gaining a larger
audience, and this will be especially good in that it will increase
general public exposure.

I have been running Sibelius 4 through Wine for a while now, and
whilst some drawing functions (like time signatures) do not work
fully, the application is otherwise totally functional, or at least it
is with version 0.9.57, with full MIDI I/O support.

Moreover, I would like to point you to MuseScore[0], which aims to
fill the niche that Sibelius fills in the proprietary world. Version
0.9.1d is available in gutsy-backports, though this demands you
download a SoundFont separately (I recommend Fluid[1], the only Free
GM/GS font I know of). mScore will be available by default in Ubuntu
Studio Hardy, as will Fluid. It is still a bit buggy, but I have got
some good usage out of it.

Toby

[0] http://mscore.sf.net
[1] http://tsmithe.users.ubuntustudio.org/fluid.html
     Debian packages are available in Ubuntu Hardy and Debian
unstable, and these should install cleanly on any Debian system, as
all they do is install a couple of files to /usr/share/sounds/sf2. See
[2].
[2] http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/f/fluid-soundfont/