[haiku] Re: Sequitur

  • From: Dan MacDonald <allcoms@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2015 08:48:27 +0100

Rosegarden has music score support whereas the other apps I mentioned do
not but its pretty much useless. If you want to produce sheet music with
free software then Musescore and lilypond are by far the best options the
free software world has to offer.

On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 8:44 AM, Dan MacDonald <allcoms@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Sequitur sounds like quite a nice sequencer so I'll give it a go when the
fixed version gets released. Good to hear it does actually have tempo
curves! However, I doubt I'll use it for anything serious as I'd really
want integrated audio support too ie I want a Haiku DAW, not just a
sequencer. We'll likely be waiting until the Haiku JACK lib replacement
gets done so that someone can port Muse or qtractor as I've not heard of
any new, fully native Haiku DAWs in the works and besides it'd likely be a
decade before it caught up to the state of the leading Linux DAWs even if
someone had already started one.

I don't see what your big problem with ALSA MIDI is unless you're talking
about it from a dev perspective - I can't really comment on that aspect of
it. From a user standpoint I can't see what the problem could be - ALSA
MIDI 'just works' with all my MIDI hardware, so long as its module is
loaded. I've never had to configure anything to do with ALSA MIDI other
than connecting apps to the required port.

I wouldn't bother with Rosegarden personally. It is a fully featured
sequencer but I think its UI is an eyesore and it has very poor audio
support so I do not consider it to be a DAW. Tracktion has become my fave
Linux audio app but qtractor is my FLOSS sequencer of choice. Muse has a
few extra features but its also buggier and the UI isn't as clean as
qtractors. The probem with qtractor from a Haiku perspective is that it
depends upon ALSA MIDI whereas Muse uses JACK MIDI so it should be more
portable.

Ardour seems to have improved a lot since v3. I've not given v4 a proper
go yet but I have looked at its bug tracker and its still got a way to go
before its as reliable as qtractor. However, dev interest has boomed in
Ardour since it unofficially started supporting Windows and there are at
least 2 commercial apps based on it now so I expect I'll end up switching
back to Ardour in a couple of years. I can't see it getting ported to Haiku
though unless GTK and cairo etc get ported which is surely no small
undertaking.



On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 7:22 AM, Pete Goodeve <pete.goodeve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 09:43:55PM +0100, Dan MacDonald wrote:
It supports arbitrary tempo changes (via a "Tempo" window). Maybe
not "ramps", as a tempo change in a midifile is always a discrete
event,
but you can get as close as you wish to a desired ramp with a suitable
number of tweaks to the graph in the window.

Sounds like it doesn't support tempo ramps as I would like where you can
automate gradual tempo changes by drawing lines or curves.


well, I stand corrected... Sequitur seems to have pretty much the feature
you're thinking of! Not a "Motion" though -- I still haven't made head or
tail of that feature, even after an hour or so of experimentation! (:-/)

There are however a few "Tools" thay apply ramps and curves to,
amongst other things, the tempo.

I think I should explain a bit about Sequitur, because it looks as if
most people are not familiar with it. It is, shall we say, a bit, um,,
idiosyncratic in the way it does things... [I also have to confess
that I'm not familiar with other sequencers. I've been meaning
to install Rosegarden in my Linux system, but I detest ALSA MIDI
enough that i've never got around to it.]

Anyway, like most sequencers, Sequitur manages a number of Tracks,
that are displayed in compact form in its main window. To work on a
track, you open a separate window on it, where you can see the events
in detail and manipulate them with "Tools". These tools are based on
"Filters" -- another feature of Sequitur --, which do various
transformations
on selected events. The simplest tools do the expected things, like
adding events, but others can do rather more complex manipulation.

What I think distiguishes Sequitur from other apps is that each track
is actually part of a "Pipeline". At input and output ends of the track
itself there are pipeline sections where any Filter can be placed to
transform events passing through it. (For example to simply transpose
notes, or change their velocity.) Other filters can copy events from
track to track, and so on, so there is incredible flexibility.

As I said, the Tools are made from filters in their own internal pipeline,
so the filters transform the events that the tool is applied to.
Unfortunately, the negative side of this is that many of the tools and
filters seem glitzy but essentially useless for rational music creation!
(:-/)
As a result I never explored them much, and was unaware that some
beyond the basic ones are worth knowing about.

As I discovered tonight, though, there are Line and Curve tools that
can be applied to any window, including and in particular the Tempo
window. The simplest is the "Line" tool which takes the straight line
formed by dragging the mouse, and generates events (in this case
tempo) with values on that line. There is also a Bezier curve generator
(though I find this a bit hard to control sensibly).

I hope that gives some idea of why Iconsider Sequitur an interesting
app. [Now if only its documentation matched... (:-/)]

-- Pete --



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