Getting Rosegarden to Work on Ubuntu 10.04

I finally have Rosegarden running on my Lenovo T60 laptop (2gb RAM). It is sweet. I can intermix midi with audio perfectly. It was, however, a bit of a pain to get running. Hopefully this information will make it easier for others. It should be noted that I have a very low tolerance for pain when it conmes to packages on my laptop (and in linux in general). Either it works out of the box as advertised or I ditch it. It is only in the case when the desired functionality is such that I absolutely need it and the pay-off is significant enough, that I will plod through the web trying to get the necessary components workingt together. Rosegarden is so good that I have to admit, it was one of the rare times where the pay-off was well worth the effort. I am very happy with my free recording studio.

Before starting, the main pre-requesite is that your alsa drivers are working with your sound card. If you can't currently play an mp3 or record using a mic and the built in sound recorder then you should probably correct these base issues before going any further or you will be wasting a lot of your time. Also note that these instructions are for a system that has no dedicated midi hardware connected to it. If you have a working piece of midi hardware then you will probably not want to deal with fluid/qsynth.

One of the first things I had to do was disable pulseaudio which until recently I was blissfully ignorant of. This is because I only have one sound card built into my laptop and it seems pulseaudio doesn't share well. It also seems that pulseaudio was automatically installed somehow by default. The quick fix is to create a file named client.conf in the .pulse subdirectory of your home directory if it doesn't already exist (mine didn't) and to add a single line in it. I used vi to create/edit it like this ...

$ cd
$ vi .pulse/client.conf

In this file I added the following line ...

autospawn = no

To make sure your edit worked do this ...

$ cd
$ cat .pulse/client.conf

Which should produce the following output ...

autospawn = no

Then reboot your system. The changes will not take effect until you reboot your system (though some have mentioned you only need to log out then back in again for the changes to take effect).

BTW - Once I did this my desktop volume control didn't work anymore but it was necessary to get my system working. Like I said, the pay-off is such that I don't even care.

Next I used the synaptic package manager to install (a) jackd, (b) fluidsynth and (c) rosegarden (its under system ---> administration). Note that jack came with jack control (a GUI for Jack), and fluidsynth came with qsynth by default when I selected them using Synaptic.

Unfortunately, even if you have everything working by this point you will still not get any sound. This is because you will now need to prepare a soft font for your software synthesizer (fluid/qsynth). The final step is to download sfark from http://www.melodymachine.com/sfark.htm and then the annoying part is it can't just be untarred in one step you actually have to do this ...

$ gunzip sfarkxtc_lx86.tar.gz
$ tar xvf sfarkxtc_lx86.tar

Otherwise it won't work. Anyway, now that you have the sound font conversion utility you can download the Fluid R3 soundfont. It is available from the HammerSound Soundfont Library (http://www.hammersound.net/) (direct link (http://www.hammersound.net/cgi-bin/soundlink.pl?action=view_category&category=Collections&ListStart=15&ListLength=15)). Omce downloaded, use the sfark utility to decompress it (it actually took like 3 minutes on my laptop) like this ...

$ ./sfarkxtc FluidR3\ GM.sfAr

And it should produce a file with a .SF2 extension (note - i had to run it as sudo for some reason). Once you have your .SF2 file we are ready to go.

The exact sequence of steps necessary to get the Rosegarden studio up is as follows ...

(1) run Jack Control (it should be under applications ---> sound). If it is not running press 'Start' to start it,
(2) run qsynth (it should be under applications ---> other).
(3) on the qsynth panel near the lower left click 'Setup' then select the soundfonts tab. Press 'Open' and point to the .SF2 file we created.
(4) finally, start Rosegarden (applications ---> sound).

If you don't bring everything up in this exact order it usually doesn't work. Also, for some reason Rosegarden launches in a separate pane.

In Rosegarden you will want to click the Studio option, then 'manage midi devices'. Here you should see the qsynth device. It will say something like 'Synth input port (xxxx:x) write'. This is the device you must select for your tracks to play out the midi software synthesizer. If you point to a track and hold down the mouse button and select 'audio device 1' you should also be able to record audio using a standard mic. You can mix and match digital and audio tracks with ease. I have had no problem so far with 2 audio tracks and 4 digital tracks. I set Jack to 48000, 1024 with real-time 32 bit and it sounds just fine.

Note that the main reason for Jack used to be audio support but Rosegarden requires Jack these days and if it is not running Rosegarden will spawn it in some sort of default mode which I couldn't get working. I had to get Jack working properly for Rosegarden to come up. That was very important. This is why I started this entry describing how to disable pulseaudio; because I couldn't get Jack to work with pulseaudio. Good luck.

2010 South Florida Poker Scene

I recently returned home to South Florida from a 3 year stint in Manhattan. When I left in 1997, the Hard Rock casino was the top poker room in the area. The pari mutuals (Jai Alai, dog and horse tracks) had small rooms (maybe 20 tables) that offered limited hours but the Hard Rock had over 70 tables and was open 24/7. I live about 15 minutes from the Pompano Harness track and when I left they also had a small (maybe 30 tables) poker room with limited hours. If you wanted to do any serious poker playing back in 1996-1997 you headed over to the Hard Rock. In fact, when I first started going to the Hard Rock around 2003-2004 you could still smoke at the poker tables.

Now I have many posts on this blog regarding my experiences in Atlantic City while I was up in New York so I won't go over that again but I will say that when I left South Florida back in 1997 I was actually looking forward to playing in AC as the South Florida scene was somewhat limited. Now that I have returned home I can say that I like the South Florida poker scene better than AC. In the 3 years I have been gone the various casino operators down here have invested heavily and we now have a good number of really good poker rooms. In fact the Hard Rock has actually lost ground in my opinion as they have moved the poker room out of the casino proper in favor of more house lucrative tables games like black jack and 3 card poker (they also have a texas hold'em vs the house game that looks interesting).

The Hard Rock poker room in my opinion is not even in the top 3 for this area anymore. I actually prefer the Pompano Harnes track as it has more tables and a better selection of ganmes and tournaments. The Hard Rock doesn't even spread Omaha anymore.

The Isle of Capri who owns the Pompano Harness track has built an entire new building devoted to slots and the poker room. They also added restaurants and bars as well as a vegas class buffet. The poker room is great. It is on the second floor and has over 70 tables. It is new and clean and almost always crowded. They spread Omaha Hi/Lo, Stud, Sit n Gos and tournaments. As of July 1st there will be no buy in limits (previously it was $100) and there is always plenty of money being passed around. They have some great weekly tournaments and best of all, no card shuffeling machines are used during tournaments (a quick note - the Hard Rock used to make sit n go players with less than $150 buy-ins play on computerized tables; no dealer. Since I am back I noticed they got rid of those automated tables). My favorite tournamnet is held every Thursday at the Pompano Harness track. Its a $150 buy-in bounty tournament. It pays $50 for each bounty and draws between 70-120 players. Payouts are usually around $3k for first, $1.5k for second, $1k for third. It typically pays out to 12-13 places. You start with like $5k in chips and it usually runs until 12-1am.

Anyway, I'll post more about some of the other poker rooms in the area over the summer. It will be interesting to see how many players we get consistently now that the snow birds have returned North for the summer.

A WindowsLess Office

So I recently decided to make my Lenovo T60 a dual-boot laptop. I had been wanting to try Ubuntu on my laptop so I popped in my old Windows2k CD and created two partitions. I planned on putting Windows on one and Ubuntu on the other.

Windows2k took about 1/2 hour to install which was expected, however, it didn't pick up any of the hardware. The VGA was defaulted to 640x480 16 colors and the Ethernet card was not recognized, nor was the wireless network. Since I couldn't even plug into a network and get to the internet the install was basically useless.

Fortunately Ubuntu had no such problems. I burned the ISO image onto a CD, popped it into the laptop and chose to use the entire hard drive for Ubuntu. Twenty minutes later my Gnome desktop came up in the right resolution and even correctly picked up the wireless adapter. I can read Office type files using built-in Open Office and after a quick Wine install I can even play poker on PDC, Poker Stars and Full-Tilt.

So it seems I am one step closer to becoming a Windowless office. My Lenovo screams. Windows took nearly 2 minutes to boot and almost as long to shut down. Ubuntu takes about 20 seconds to boot and even less to shut down. I also downloaded Chromium (the open source version of Chrome) and it is about 50% faster then Firefox. All in all I am pretty happy with Ubuntu on my laptop. If all goes well over the next month or so the desktop is also gonna get Ubuntu (10.04 BTW).