wanted: midi synth/player and composer

[Raichu]

Until recently, I've been using Windows XP and I was able to do midi composition and playing on my computer. I used the freeware version of Anvil Studio to compose polyphonic midi files. It used midi files as its save format. Windows Media Player played midi files very nicely using whatever synthesizer came with Windows.

I've got Kubuntu 8.04 on my new computer now and I was wondering if there are any equivalent tools for composing and playing midi files.

I have tried Lilypond in the past but I found it very difficult to use and I had trouble playing the midi output as well (although it produces lovely printed scores). I did a web search and found MuseScore. Could anyone who has tried it or equivalent tools what their experience has been?

I also found a very complicated howto on this forum (http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-8736.html) but I noticed that it is several years old so hopefully things might have gotten a trifle easier (or is that wishful thinking?). If anyone could point me in the right direction I'd be very grateful.

[paulmerchant]

You probably want to install Rosegarden and use it for your notation. I hear of quite a few people who never use Rosegarden for recording and other DAW work, but they like it for notation.

I've been using Denemo a bit. I've only done simple notation with it so far, but it's also a Lilypond front end. It plays midi through Timidity (or Csound). You have to read the manual and use keystrokes, but I kind of like it. However, Denemo is GTK and geared toward Gnome. Rosegarden is KDE and should fit nicely with your Kubuntu.

There are others, but these are the two I've looked at.

[Raichu]

I tried Rosegarden on my son's Ubuntu last year and it was a miserable failure, and only after spending all day downloading it. Has anyone actually got it working?

[luctor]

Rosegarden works out of the box here...

[violinist2009]

I like lmms, although it currently works better for me in windows (something I hope to fix;))

[neu2buntu]

rosegarden needs a program called qjackctl to work properly, although i have only used it a few times it seems a powerfull bit of software... just google for a pdf manual of these applications and learn how to use them