Rosegarden

Rosegarden is a digital audio workstation program written in Qt. It acts as an audio and MIDI sequencer, scorewriter and musical composition and editing tool. It is intended to be a free alternative to such applications as Cubase.

Installation

Install the rosegarden package. Be sure to install a MIDI setup first.

Configuration

Customizing keyboard shortcuts

The keyboard shortcuts in rosegarden can be customized by editing a set of XML configuration files. The first step is to download the default configuration files which are packaged with the source code, and place them in ~/.local/share/rosegarden/rc. A simple way of doing this is to run

$ cd ~/.local/share/rosegarden
$ svn co http://svn.code.sf.net/p/rosegarden/code/trunk/rosegarden/data/rc

which will get the configuration files from the development branch of the source code.

Note: The above procedure gets the configuration files from the development branch of Rosegarden, which could possibly be incompatible with the stable release. If needed, the rc directory can be found at data/rc in the stable release's source tarball instead.

Keyboard shortcuts can then be set or modified by editing the appropriate file in ~/.local/share/rosegarden/rc. For example, in order to map the Space bar to play/pause, edit the following lines of rosegardenmainwindow.rc

~/.local/share/rosegarden/rc/rosegardenmainwindow.rc

<Action name="play" text="&Play" icon="transport-play" shortcut="Ctrl+Enter, Enter, Media Play, Ctrl+Return, Space" shortcut-context="application" />
<Action name="recordtoggle" text="P&unch in Record" icon="transport-record" shortcut="" shortcut-context="application" />

Usage

With Timidity and Pulseaudio

Launch Timidity as a daemon before launching Rosegarden :

$ timidity -iA

This way, Rosegarden will not launch jackd and you will still be able to hear sound from other running applications.