Rose garden does not make a sound

English Multimedia
1

I can’t get any sound out of this program. I started jack and everything and am out of ideas. I therefore captured all the output of the program. It was 16,000+ lines long so I removed most of it. Another thing that bothers me is why it can’t load my ladspa plugins. Again sorry about the size, but there’s not to much I can do if I want it fixed.
PS. Both VLC and M player can use jack so it’s not jack that’s the problem.

I eliminated the lines containing the message [genaric], [notation],
most of the lines containing [seq*] messages,
and JackGraphManager#the latency always was 2048 port index 11
It’s about 1,200 lines long. Foo! It’s still to long hang on a second…
Boy that’s a small 1,200 line long file…
If you need more just ask.

Thorn - true
Qt translations path: /usr/share/qt4/translations
Qt translations not loaded.
NOTE: Found stylesheet at “/usr/share/rosegarden/rosegarden.qss”, applying it
AlsaDriver::AlsaDriver [begin]
Rosegarden 11.11.42 - AlsaDriver [ALSA library version 1.0.25, module version 1.0.25, kernel version 3.4.11-2.16-vanilla]
AudioPluginManager::Enumerator::run()
ALSA Client information:
AlsaDriver::setCurrentTimer((auto))
AlsaDriver::versionIsAtLeast: is version 1.0.25 at least 1.0.14? yes
AlsaDriver::versionIsAtLeast: is version 3.4.11-2.16-vanilla at least 2.6.20? yes
Using low-resolution system timer, sending a warning
WARNING: using system timer with only 250Hz resolution!
AlsaDriver::initialiseMidi - initialised MIDI subsystem
audio file manager emitting fake setValue(100)
Profiler : id = initialiseStudio - elapsed = 10ms CPU, 0.001558000R real
[seqman] SegmentMapper : 0x3271610 m_mapped = 0x337d9b0
[seqman] Sound driver status is: 7
Profiler : id = initialiseStudio - elapsed = 10ms CPU, 0.001597000R real
[seqman] Sound driver status is: 7
MAIN WINDOW DISPLAY WARNING: type 2 text<h3>System timer resolution is too low!</h3>
AudioPluginManager::Enumerator::run() - done
Warning: Unable to load any of the fonts in “fughetta”
Warning: Unable to load any of the fonts in “inkpen2,inkpen”
Warning: Unable to load any of the fonts in “maestro”
Warning: Unable to load any of the fonts in “opus”
Warning: Unable to load any of the fonts in “sonata”
ALSA Client information:
Warning: Unable to load any of the fonts in “xinfonia”
Warning: Unable to load any of the fonts in “fughetta”
Warning: Unable to load any of the fonts in “inkpen2,inkpen”
Warning: Unable to load any of the fonts in “maestro”
using paths: examples: “/usr/share/rosegarden/examples”
templates: “/usr/share/rosegarden/templates”
rosegarden: “/home/ballsystemlord/rosegarden”
Warning: Unable to load any of the fonts in “opus”
Warning: Unable to load any of the fonts in “sonata”
Warning: Unable to load any of the fonts in “xinfonia”
I am here!
audio file manager emitting fake setValue(100)
Profiler : id = initialiseStudio - elapsed = 0ms CPU, 0.001572000R real
Warning: Composition::~Composition() with 3 observers still extant
ALSA Client information:
[seqman] Sound driver status is: 7
AudioPlayQueue::~AudioPlayQueue()
Profiling points:
By name:
Real: 0.005438000 ms [2.186000000 ms total]

some more stuff here

/usr/lib/ladspa/sc1_1425.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32
WARNING: LADSPAPluginFactory::discoverPlugins: couldn’t dlopen /usr/lib/ladspa/sc2_1426.so - /usr/lib/ladspa/sc2_1426.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32
WARNING: LADSPAPluginFactory::discoverPlugins: couldn’t dlopen /usr/lib/ladspa/sc3_1427.so - /usr/lib/ladspa/sc3_1427.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32
WARNING: LADSPAPluginFactory::discoverPlugins: couldn’t dlopen /usr/lib/ladspa/sc4_1882.so - /usr/lib/ladspa/sc4_1882.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32
WARNING: LADSPAPluginFactory::discoverPlugins: couldn’t dlopen /usr/lib/ladspa/sc4m_1916.so -

some more stuff here

2

It was 16,000+ lines long

Do use SUSE Paste and share the link here. Remember to set proper expiry time . It defaults to 1 week which can be low :frowning:

old how to ,but may help
setting up Rosegarden (for MIDI music) in Linux (Ubuntu 8.04)

3

It might help to post the following details:

What openSUSE version and KDE/Gnome/etc.??
What version of jack and rosegarden and which repo did they come from??
What type of synth are you using, hardware (what is it?) or software (e.g. Qsynth. What version?)?
What sound card/chip (make & model)?

4

It’s pasted. I hope I did it right. If you REALLY want the whole thing ask again.
Hardware and software follows:

suse 12.2 all packages from the os repo IE look there for versions.
Mother board msi 890gxm-g65
CPU amd 1090T
**audio alc 889
**memory ddr3 1333
harddisk hitachi sata 7500rpm

In case I wasn’t clear enough I don’t think it’s jack, vlc and mplayer work fine when I tell them to use jack.

5

If you don’t have time to provide version-release for a couple of packages, why do you think anyone else here has the time to look them up for you? Everyone here is volunteering their time, unpaid.

And “In case I wasn’t clear enough”, what type of synth are you using? In the absence of an answer, well cpu/memory/disk don’t cut it, so I have to assume you need a software synthesizer [for sound].

Read through this page:Frequently Asked Questions for Rosegarden 10.02 and Later from the Rosegarden Wiki. Rosegarden doesn’t have one, so if you want sound, you will need a soft synth (QSynth + fluidsynth, or TiMidity++, etc.), and a soundfont.

Good luck with that.

6

I will try starting timidity and see if that helps.

7

If you are new to Rosegarden I would recommend to try out Xsynth. Xsynth may not be very fancy, but it is convenient to use in this case as you run it as a synth plug-in. Xsynth uses DSSI which is similar to VSTi for linux.
In my view, this is a bit easier to set-up and start using than e.g. Timidity or QSynth/Fluidsynth which will involve several more steps to get you running, including config of sound-fonts.

8

I had started timidity via yast and that did not work. Using this command however did:

timidity -iA -Oj -B2,8

Once rosegarden started I clicked on the small yellow triangle icon with a black “!” mark in the center located in the lower right hand part of the screen. It poped up a box reading:
"System timer resolution is too low!
Rosegarden was unable to find a high-resolution
timing source for MIDI performance.
You may be able to solve this problem by loading
the RTC timer kernel module. To do this, try
running sudo modprobe snd-rtctimer in a
terminal window and then restarting Rosegarden.
Alternatively, check whether your Linux distributor
provides a multimedia-optimized kernel. See the
Rosegarden website for notes about this.
I executed the recommended command and it’s out put was:
FATAL: Module snd_rtctimer not found.

What should I do?
If I am going to recomple my kernel to have a faster timer it may be a good idea to discover why the timer was set so low in the first place. Perhaps when I upgrade to 12.3 and if I need a faster timer I could find a different download option so as to start out with a kermnel with a faster timer.

9

I have always used QSynth with Rosegarden. Haven’t used Timidity for years, never with Rosegarden, as it had an unreliable history with Rosegarden. A long time ago now, Rosegarden needed a real-time kernel to work at all.

I used to run Rosegarden and QSynth with Jack, with the standard desktop kernel and no performance issues. Jack’s setup always needs a bit of tuning to match one’s system. However, since PulseAudio appeared, QSynth has a choice of sound-server interfaces, and can work directly with PulseAudio (the default sound server) on openSUSE, which is how I used it mostly on 12.1 and 11.4. At that time, Jack and PulseAudio didn’t function well together. I haven’t set up Rosegarden on 12.2, mainly due to the ridiculous number of dependencies it now needs, but will try to do that this evening on a spare test system I have now. Will post back here with what I find, good or bad.

You shouldn’t need to have a special kernel just to get Rosegarden started with some midi playback, with or without Jack, given that standard kernel-desktop copes with low enough latency to support PulseAudio. If I were you, I would try @F_Sauces’ suggestion and abandon Timidity.

10

Could you tell something about your audio settings: audio group, priority settings in limits.conf etc.
And also check which kernel you use, though I expect that also the ‘default’ one should cope decent enough. However, Rosegarden might complain about the timer frequency if you use the default-kernel.
And you should tell how you start JACK and with what settings.

My guess is, though, that your problems are related to Pulseaudio (if you use it that is:)), but to have a good basic set-up is always fine. I do not know Timidity but installed it, started JACK with QJackCtl, started Timidity with the parameters you provided and then started Rosegarden; all seems fine on my system, and no error messages when hitting the ‘panic’ (!) button. I do not use Pulesaudio.

Let’s see what consused comes up with, and in any case OpenSuSE 12.2 should not be the obstacle for you to have your system running Rosegarden successfully.

11

Make sure you have added your user account to the “audio” group. Then configure pam, for real-time priorities:
Edit with (root privileges) and add following two lines to /etc/security/limits.conf:
@audio - rtprio 99
@audio - memlock unlimited

Save and restart. That will set the highest real-time priority, and cater for any greedy audio apps.

12

Last night’s testing on standard 12.2 (kernel-desktop-3.4.28-2.20.1.x86_64) was successful for Rosegarden, replaying a handful of .midi files.

Software used: Rosegarden, jack and qjackctl, all from the distribution repos. Qsynth from packman-multimedia. PulseAudio was enabled by default throughout, but no other audio applications were run (apart from KMix running in the system tray). Oh yes, the “ridiculous number of dependencies”, didn’t occur installing Rosegarden. IIRC they were extra 32bit packages required when I last tried it, and I’m trying to keep to 64bit now, so it remains a mystery.

Before starting, Qsynth was enabled to check its PulseAudio driver. A qsynth message, alerting that no real-time priority was set, reminded me to add my user account to “audio” group, set rtprio and memlock in /etc/security/limits.conf (as in previous post), and restart. That will definitely be required for running Jack and Rosegarden. Results in testing order:

  1. Rosegarden + Qsynth > PulseAudio driver: the synth instantly showed up in Rosegarden > Studio menu > Manage MIDI Devices, in MIDI Playback section.
    As in the past, providing I closed one .midi file before opening another, the Studio didn’t drop the synth. If it does, you just click on it in Manage MIDI Devices to re-enable. Apart from that there were no issues, but I did get a message (yellow triangle!) warning that it hadn’t reached Jack and performance could be improved. I couldn’t see how, just on playback which if anything was a little faster in tempo than remembered.

Configuring Qsynth’s driver, between PulseAudio and Jack, can cause Qsynth to hang until “not responding message” enables closure and restart In the past I have had to kill the running process. Once the driver changed over, there were no hiccups.

  1. RoseGarden + Qsynth + Jack: Started Jack first. So many more messages now! Didn’t understand many of them, but happily no overruns. Checked the setup that looked ok, so accepted the defaults, and made sure that Jack started, stopped and restarted ok via QjackCtl. Then started Qsynth, and Rosegarden.
    No yellow triangle! messages, and no overruns using default settings. Playback of all files worked perfectly. Easier than on previous releases, and I didn’t need to disable PulseAudio for this test.
13

I did that today, starting Timidity from command line, with those parameters. Loads of output in the terminal - ok I think. Then started Rosegarden. Jack’s connections looked good. Checked Studio, in MIDI Playback section were four write ports set up. However .midi files played with extremely poor sound quality overlaid with a staccato noise continually present, rather like a mechanical device running (or machine gun). Could stop playback, but the dreadful noise continued until Rosegarden was terminated. There were no yellow triangle! messages.

I didn’t manage to terminate Timidity running in the terminal (lack of know-how). Terminating Konsole did just that, but did not kill Timidity. Starting Timidity in a new Konsole, started a second process. Starting Rosegarden added four more write ports (eight in total). Not a very user friendly solution with Timidity (IMO).

I checked KMix while Timidity was running, for any additional playback streams on PulseAudio, and none were showing.

Interested if you have any comments on any of that. :slight_smile:

14

Hello consused,

Yes the playback was awful, but I merely thought of it as a Timidity issue at first. However, after reading your post I experienced a bit and found that starting Timidity in ALSA mode, by issuing this command: timidity -iA -B2,8 (I omitted -Oj from the original command), made Timidity play a clean piano sound, with no noticeable distortion in Rosegarden (I have two sound devices in my computer, so even if JACK is forced to start by Rosegarden * JACK does not take hold of my system’s default device, the on-board chip. I have a decent sound device which I only use in conjunction with JACK, nothing else). I still believe, though maybe a bit presumptuous, that it has do do with Timidity, perhaps it’s just not suitable as a low-latency synth or that it may just require some different parameters at start-up. I don’t know. But just to check that things otherwise was normal, I did a test run of QSynth and Xsynth-dssi with Rosegarden and JACK; there was no distortion or other anomalies with those apps. So, sound on my system seems generally fine.

To stop a terminal started Timidy session type ‘Ctrl + c’ in Konsole/terminal before you close Konsole/terminal itself; I didn’t know this, but this is in fact the way I usually do close sessions in Konsole so I tested it and it seemed to work:)*

15

I checked KMix, while Timidity was running, for any additional playback streams on PulseAudio, and none were showing

KMix didn’t provide me with any new options either, I tested starting Timidity in both ALSA and JACK mode. I do not have PulseAudio running. I am a bit puzzled, though, that I did not find a JACK connection available (when JACK was running) within ‘System settings > Multimedia > Phonon’, didn’t it used to be an option, earlier, to use JACK as a playback ‘device’?

16

I don’t recall seeing that in Phonon settings before. I didn’t look there on 12.2 for it.

While you were testing, I also had been doing tests with Timidity without Jack, and will post shortly on that in answer to your previous post. :slight_smile:

17

Hi, and thanks for testing and comments. I’m going to stick with PulseAudio, and your approach without it helps to compare and contrast results. After seeing your removal of the Jack output option, I since tried it without success. I have in the past seen enough failures with Rosegarden + Timidity when researching it and trying to use it with Jack, not to be surprised. I’m not convinced it is Timidity’s problem. Before seeing your post, I had just completed tests with Timidity, using same SF2 as for Qsynth, and running in terminal as normal user:

  1. Timidity alone, as a MIDI player, played the .mid files perfectly at familiar tempo, through the ALSA plug-in (KMix displayed), without specifying any options.

  2. Timidity run as a daemon (timidity -iA) with ALSA sequencer interface specified, sets up four ALSA ports to be used by other programs e.g. Rosegarden. However it’s better and easier to simply run it in background (timidity -iA &), and to display the ports (aconnect -o):

client 14: 'Midi Through' [type=kernel]
    0 'Midi Through Port-0'
client 128: 'TiMidity' [type=user]
    0 'TiMidity port 0 '
    1 'TiMidity port 1 '
    2 'TiMidity port 2 '
    3 'TiMidity port 3 '

Then simply test using “aplaymidi” e.g. aplaymidi /path_to_your_ midi_file_/example.mid --port 128:0
Again this worked perfectly, at tempo, through ALSA plug-in > PulseAudio.

  1. With Timidity set up as in 2. above (or run as daemon), now testing with Rosegarden, I see the same four ports with General MIDI Device pointing at “128:0 Timidity port 0 (write)”. However, playing the same .mid file achieves silence! The file is loaded, the transport moves, and ALSA plug-in is displayed by KMix as the playback stream, but silence every time! BTW, ALSA plugin is displayed when Rosegarden opens and disappears on exit.

With silence as a result in some tests, partial sound playback sometimes occurs on closing Rosegarden. That’s an old symptom.

Conclusion: Timidity only fails with Rosegarden [and PulseAudio]. If aplaymidi works, what is Rosegarden’s problem?

Thanks for the “Ctrl c” tip, of course, why did I forget that. :D.

18

Yes, I only have the integrated sound chip. I misread your comment there about ‘new’ Rosegarden, thinking it wasn’t referring to 12.2’s version of 11.11.42-3.1.6. It does start jackd. That may be causing the problem during my test with Rosegarden + Timidity > ALSA plug-in > PulseAudio, as here:

A repeat of “3.” without “jackd” starting would be good. This is how I did it:

Start Rosegarden alone, having killed off timidity (Ctrl+Esc for System Activity, right-click entry for menu).
Kill “jackd” from that System Activity panel to see if it returns. It took two or three goes as it restarts, and replying ok to Rosegarden’s alerts.
Start Timidity in terminal, to run in background (timidity -iA &). KMix should show ALSA plug-in [timidity] as a Playback Stream.
In Rosegarden: open .mid file. Then Studio > Manage Midi Devices, make sure General Midi Device points to Timidy port 0
Playback your MIDI.

It now played perfectly clear, at tempo, through ALSA plug-in > PulseAudio.

New overall Conclusion: Rosegarden + Timidity > Jack, plays badly here. Rosegarden + Timidity > PulseAudio, plays well but with messy setup required to avoid conflict with jackd.

Why do people bother with Timidity for Rosegarden MIDI, when Qsynth is available? They must be needing to use Timidity without a decent Soundfont.*

19

Yes, I only have the integrated sound chip. I misread your comment there about ‘new’ Rosegarden, thinking it wasn’t referring to 12.2’s version of 11.11.42-3.1.6. It does start jackd. That may be causing the problem during my test with Rosegarden + Timidity > ALSA plug-in > PulseAudio, as here:

I don’t know if you used to use Rosegarden ‘KDE3 version’, but that one started in ALSA mode if JACK wasn’t running? It was this version I referred to, being the ‘old’ one, a bit unclear reference I suppose. But interesting to see that you managed to stop jackd while Rosegarden was running. I like the ZynAddSubFX synthesiser, but it isn’t very usable in JACK mode. So what I do is I compose in Rosegarden, output it with ZynAddSubFX running in ALSA (OSS) mode and record the audio produced with ZynAddSubFX itself; before I then again import the audio back to Rosegarden, or Ardour for that matter. This goes fine with two sound devices, but I have another computer which only has one device and on that computer this feature of the ‘new’ Rosegarden has been a problem:)

Why do people bother with Timidity for Rosegarden MIDI, when Qsynth is available? They must be needing to use Timidity without a decent Soundfont.

I totally agree although I’m quite unfamiliar with Timidty; perhaps it has some hidden features which deludes us (read: me) ‘ignorant’ users? When I started using Linux, the first synth I used with Rosegarden was in fact Timidty, this was with SuSE 9.1.; back then, I remembered that I did not manage to use it without a sound-font (and I struggled a lot to set it up with one also, being a newbie and quite unfamiliar with configuring config files in a text editor,[without a GUI]), so I was a bit surprised when I installed Timidty now and managed to have sound without any. I have a lot of sound-fonts and other samples stored in my home directory which I use with QSynth, but those are not available for Timidty unless I configure it to use them. So, I suppose this parameter: timidity -iA -B2,8 (the part in red) points to a Timidty integrated sample (Gus, SF2 etc.)?
And, I find QSynth a very easy and usable sample based synth to use.

Concerning your tests with ALSA commands: aplaymidi, aconnect etc, I am not familiar with those, and I got a bit confused with what you meant with ‘tempo’ in this context. But I may, if you wish, test for specific results on my system if you provide specific commands for me to issue.

Cheers,
Olav

20

How does it go ballsystemlord? You should be fine once you overcome the initial Linux audio set-up ‘know-how’ obstacles.
Some useful audio on Linux, Linux as DAW, information here: start [LinuxMusicians Wiki]