I was a MA/MST student at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Accoustics.
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I will be playing at CCRMA's Transitions concert on the 28th. I'm slowly working on my piece. I've switched sequencers from Rosegarden to MusE. I couldn't get the MIDI thru routing to switch instruments in Rosegarden, and that, coupled with how it wouldn't maintain my MIDI device settings, made it very onorus to use in my composition workflow. Too much behavior has changed since last release; maybe the next one will be something I can use again. MIDI export also seems to be broken in this version (note durations sometimes extend to many times what they should be in exported files), so it was difficult to move my project over. But I got it there eventually. MusE sequencer seems like it doesn't try to do so many things behind the scenes, which is much better for what I'm trying to do. The two things I immediately miss are being able to resize notes just by dragging the ends in the piano roll (instead you have to select the eraser, then ctrl-right click) and "previewing" notes by selecting them in the piano roll (I haven't been able to find out if this is an option; so far it doesn't seem to be available). The latter is espeicially useful for me since I don't have absolute pitch, but I can deal with not having it. The former will just take a little getting used to. MusE also crashed once and my project got corrupted. And overall CPU usage seems higher. But that's all the bad stuff. The good stuf: 1) It has auto-backup so I was immediately able to recover my corrupted project! 2) Setting up my synthesizer as a MIDI device was straightforward, and all the settings were maintained across saving and loading. 3) MusE uses Jack MIDI, which I just started using in my synthesizer. Timings should be much tighter now. 4) No "extra" MIDI events flying around. It's just doing what I tell it to, which I appreciate a great deal. 5) Most importantly, I can actually work on the piece now. The great and terrible things about Linux audio (and perhaps Linux in general) are choice and change. People will direct projects in many different ways, sometimes in the way you want, and sometimes in some other way. But often there are other choices which may suit your needs better. And a great thing about open-source is that you can generally go back to an older configuration if you really need to and are willing to spend the time setting things up. I'm still going to try to write my own sequencer someday. But in the meantime I'm glad that there are multiple mature projects that I can use for making music.