| wiki | search |
In the FAQ (frequently asked questions) we try to avoid questions get answered or asked twice. So we can spend our man-power on subjects where it's more needed as in answering new questions or creating nice music. If your question isn't listed here please ask in the user mailing list. We will answer your request and maybe add the question and the answer here.
The MusE Developer Team
What is MusE good for?
What can MusE do for me so far?
MusE is a MIDI/Audio sequencer with recording and editing capabilities. The long version would be: you can use MusE to record from a midi source like a midi keyboard or a drum computer and then do a playback later you can also record some wave output aka multitrack recording.
MusE aims to be a complete multitrack virtual studio for Linux!
- Midi sequencing
Record midi notes or sysex and edit them if you need to. - Audio sequencing
Use some audio tracks to record from serveral diffrent sources (you need a soundcard with a lot audio inputs) - LADSPA
This plugins do some nice things like chorus or reverb on your wave tracks in realtime. - Jack
MusE uses jack to perform audio i/o. This is handy if you got a a big setup. - ALSA
For MIDI everything is based on the alsa layer within the linux kernel.
Workaround: external gear + softsynth
I found a workaround to this in the end so I guess this is a bug report.
Muse 0.7, gcc 3.2.2, redhat9/planetccrma.
Problem: in a song with a softsynth (fluidsynth) and external midi (hardware) synths, on loading, none of the external midi gets played. Oddly, clicking on the pianoroll in the relevant parts does play external notes, but the recorded parts don't play.
Workaround: remove the softsynth instance, save, load, re-instantiate the softsynth - it all works.
I hope this helps anyone with a similar problem!
Crispin
Wave - output ports are still visible in qjackctl although deleted in MusE
This is because of the undo function which just hides the track from the arranger. This could not have been done differently because then you would lose all your routings if you use "undo" from within MusE.
Language support in MusE?
MusE's native language is "english" and so everything is english so far. There are some translations different language but not complete for 0.7
Read here for more information on language support.
But we need YOU so if you want to translate the interface into your native language you can do a great job for us. This isn't a hard job by the way, you have just to fill a html-form with your translation for all the dialoges.
MusE installed with success but no synthesizers found
Ok you build the latest 0.7 MusE source and installed it with "make install". If you type "muse" MusE is starting and most things are working well, except that the softsynths like vam, s1, fluidsynth are missing.
This could be due a bug we didn't find so far.
Change the directory to: /usr/local/lib/muse/synthi or the one you installed the softsynths and do the following:
First check if there are the <anyname>.so files. If not they were build correctly but not renamed. So we have to do that now, so do:
mv fluid fluid.so mv vam vam.so mv s1 s1.so mv organ organ.so mv fluid fluid.so
Ok let's try if it worked. Start MusE with "muse" in the console. (you should be root) and don't forget to start the "jackd -d alsa" command.
MusE or MuSE
MusE is the midi/audio sequencing application. But there is also a project called the same, altough written diffrent: MuSE
MuSE is an application for the mixing, encoding, and network streaming of sound. But MuSE can be usefull if you want to play live and you want to broadcast your audio stream to the public!
You can find it here: http://muse.dyne.org/
But keep in mind that we don't have to do anything with the MuSE project except sharing the name ;-)
Is my soundcard supported by MusE?
If your soundcard is listed in the alsa-supported soundcards you have a pretty good chance to get MusE working with it.
- You need WAV functionality only if you want to record your music with your computer or if you have softsynths like the internal ones of MusE or external like zynaddsubfx. You need it probably if you want to use your internal wavetables(sfx) of your soundcard, too.
- In most cases you want to use MIDI (IN/OUT), so don't forget to check if your soundcard also has MIDI support
Alsa documentation is here http://www.alsa-project.org/documentation.php3
Hardware - what hardware do I have to run MusE?
That depends on what you are going to do:
- MIDI ONLY, If you use it only for midi and and have only external midi equipment you could get away with:
- Pentium II 400+ MHz
- 128+ MB ram
- WAV/MIDI If you use midi and a few channels of audio for recording
- 700 MHz (400Mhz Pentium II has been known to work previously)
- 128+ MB ram, if you are running a desktop environment like KDE or GNOME you will probably want atleast 256 mb.
- WAV/MIDI If you use internal softsynths and several audio channels for recording. This is where the fun stuff starts and there are good possibilities to choke the computer. Softsynths take CPU, LADSPA effects take CPU. Some softsynths utilize samples which eat memory.
- 700-> (the sky's the limit) MHz (the more the merrier)
- 256->(the sky's the limit) MB ram, 512 MB is a good start.
I'm stuck, I can't get anything to work, can someone help me?
Did you read the manual? Did you search with google.de for your problem? If yes then and you didn't find what you were searching for then the best place to probably get help is one of the mailinglists available on
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=93414
I don't get any midi out of MusE, what is wrong?
If you are using MusE 0.7 or any previous version this could also result of a missconfiguration. This occures sometimes, try this:
- move /root/.MusE (out of the way -> /root/.MusE_backup for ex.
- move /root/.musePrj to /root/.musePrj_backup for ex.
This could solve your problem. If it didn't work rename the files and get your original config back.
If you are running MusE 0.6.2 it is likely this is due to a bug. On some systems it caused midi playback to simply not work. It is fixed in 0.6.3.
If this is not your problem and you still have trouble getting any midi out of MusE try to follow any of the tutorials. If this doesn't work, do ask your question on the mailinglist.
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=93414
I can't rewind audio tracks, huh?
There is a known issue with QT3.2 and MusE 0.6.x, the transport fails to work as it is supposed to. Unfortunately the only workaround at the moment is to not use QT3.2, QT3.1 works perfectly. Note that it does not seem to affect everybody using QT3.2, if it seems to work there should not be any reason to downgrade.
While starting MusE it just hangs, what is wrong?
MusE 0.6.x is runnable in a number of configurations:
- No audio (midi only) (this is only for the 0.6.x branche, 0.7 doesn't have this)
- Alsa (audio through alsa)
- Jack (audio through Jack http://jackit.sourceforge.net )
Depending on which you try there are different start criteria that need to be met for MusE to start correctly.
For starters, when you run MusE from a command line, check for error messages. (see the manual for more on command line usage)
An easy test that fixes several issues is to run MusE as root. If this works you know that it's probably a permission problem you've got. Compare the error log you got earlier to the log you get when running as root to get an idea what might have gone wrong.
Common issues are that RTC is not writeable by the user that is trying to invoke MusE.
Another one is that MusE is unable to set real-time scheduling on it's internal threads, realtime scheduling is pretty much a requirement to get good timing. See the question "MusE has lousy timing! Can it be fixed?" for some more information about this.
If all else fails, by now you should know where to look... no? Okay I'll tell you; the mailinglists (( http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=93414 ) :)
MusE has lousy timing! Can it be fixed?
By running MusE with the option '-R', MusE tries to set it's internal threads to realtime, to get good timing in MusE this is pretty much a requirement.
Some common ways to achieve realtime is:
- run as root,
- add the suid bit to the MusE executable (thus giving it root access even as a standard user).
- use capabilities patch (might require a kernel patch, if your kernel doesn't already have it applied)
- if you are running kernel 2.6 or newer you could use the LSM realtime module
There are drawbacks to all of these, mostly to do with bypassing the built in security mechanism that Linux has, it's for instance quite easy to have your machine lock-up tight by fiddeling with realtime capabilites. Another issue is that programs that allowed to run as root are a security threat. It's up to every user to decide if this threat is to be taken seriously. To grade the variants above in "secureness" i'd say number four is most secure followed by three and one, with number two as the least secure. Which by chance is, together with one, what is most commonly used since it's easy to setup.
Where can I get more information about Linux Audio in general?
You want to have a look at the MusE's Links section. We also introduce some nice programs in the Tools section.
Is MusE running on Windows
There is no port so far and nobody is working on this. If you feel you could and want to port MusE feel free to ask in our mailinglist. BUT before you do this take this advice:
midi implementation
A common problem is that muse used the ALSA midi system since jack-audio-connection kit didn't provide sample accurate midi processing for a long time. This changed lately and since then jack-audio-connection kit supports this. I'm not sure which version of muse uses this yet. Before any porting attempt it would be wise to adapt totally to jack-audio-connection kit midi and abandon the use of the ALSA sequencer.
muse 0.7++ (all qt3 dependant muse builds)
Windows uses [ASIO | http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Stream_Input/Output] The main problem with Windows is that there is no jack-audio-connection kit using ASIO as backend yet. This will probably change with jack 2.0. Until then it's not possible. BUT the main issue here is: MusE 0.7-1.x relays on [Trolltech's] Qt library version 3.x which also exists for windows but is only accessable with a commercial license - even for OpenSource projects like MusE is one. Using Qt4.x on windows enables the GPL based (open source) usage of Qt4.x on windows as well as on linux/macosX. Since muse 0.7-0.9 is based on Qt3.x we can't port it.
muse 2.0 (all qt4 dependant muse bilds)
Since we use Qt4.x it should really be simple to port MusE to windows and macosX. Still we need low level support of jack-audio-connection kit which should be running on macosX already but not on windows. But the windows port is being developed - at least the for jack 2.0 (and higher).
Is MusE running on a MAC
If your question was weather MusE is running on PPC then the answer would be yes it is running. Maybe you have to compile MusE on you own but it's working. BUT if the question was: is it running on MAC OS X then the answer would be NO!
I tried the internal synthesizer, but couldn't find any sound
To use one of MusE's internal synthesizers you need patches.
- organ-1 patches:
- This synthesizers produces nice organ like sounds just out of the box.
- fluidsynth/fluid:
- This will give you a wide range of all kind of sounds. But you'll need soundfont files normally called "somename.sf2", get some from here:
- http://www.hammersound.net/
- http://www.synthzone.com/soundfont.htm
- vam
- This synthesizers produces nice organ like sounds just out of the box.
- s1:
- This is not really usable for music (unless you have very "specific" taste), it is meant as a programming example for people meaning to provide softsynths
Using midi sometimes gives strange results pressing some keys on the keyboard
While playing the piano and using MusE's midi abilities some keys lead to strange MusE behaviour like pressing play as done with the mouse usually. This can be because you didn't disable the Input Plugin - Midi Remote Keyboard function which is used to record multiple times without a single click, just pressing a certain key on your keyboard.
recover a MusE crash
Before you start MusE, type this in the console:
ulimit -c 1000000000
Then, when MusE crashes, you will get a coredump. Coredumps can be used to extract info about what happened. Get in contact with us trough our mailing list and tell every you did, maybe we can recover the error based on your coredump and what you did.
Precount doesn't work / Prerecord and Preroll are always disabled.
The metronome settings window has a section for "Precount", but the precount doesn't work. Behind the scenes, the support for precount was removed when MusE was Jack-enabled. Jack simply doesn't support it. This is also why the Prerecord and Preroll checkboxes are always disabled.
A workaround is to position the left loop marker where recording should start, then enable Punch-in. You can then position the song pointer (cursor) before that point by as many bars as you want. When you start recording the song will play from the song pointer position, giving you a lead in before recording starts at the punch-in point.
