Anyway I'd be interested to hear whether anyone has found software to do the following:
Capture MIDI events from an external midi controller keyboard to a MIDI file whilst at the same time playing them on the sound card, despite the fact that the soundcard doesn't have a midi synth on-board.
I have found timidity which is able to play MIDI files on my sound card (Soundblaster PCI = ES1371) but there doesn't seem to be a way to use this real time, i.e. it expects the data in a file.
There are some "experimental" patches to timidity to get it to act as the synth for an ALSA system. OSS, out of luck, and this still doesn't save to a file. Overall, flakey on a P133 ;-) http://www.parabola.demon.co.uk/alsa/timid.html
I also tried a couple of MIDI sequencer programs, one of which is the one built in to rosegarden and the other whose name I forget but both complained that the high-level MIDI interface to the sound card wasn't available and refused to do anything useful.
Glad I'm not the only one to have found this!
- Music Typesetting. Currently I have Rosegarden but I find that entering notes with this program is very slow, so I'd be interested to hear if there is anything else out there.
Depends what sort of music. For simple (and not quite so simple) I'd use one of the ABC tools, abc2ps or something. For more complex stuff, MusicTeX is there for the brave! Both these are text-based, not WYSIWYG.
An example of an ABC file:
X:1 T:Speed The Plough M:4/4 L:1/8 K:G GABc dedB|dedB dedB|c2ec B2dB|A2A2A2BA|GABc dedB|dedB dedB|c2ec B2dB|A2A2G4:: g2g2g4|g2fe dBGB|c2ec B2dB|A2A2A4|g2g2g4|g2fe dBGB|c2ec B2dB|A2A2G4:|
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