Midi, Bristol & Synth performance
Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2012 4:08 pm
Not a query. I just thought I'd report my success with Bristol - a retro synthesiser emulator covering such classics as Prophet5, Rhodes Piano, Hammond, ARP Odessey and many others.
Really good emulation and a great looking visual reperesentation as well
Since Bristol is by nature executed from the command line I installed the semi-gui front end monobristol that gives a push button selection of each synth type.
simply run this:
sudo apt-get monobristol
Everything else happens by itself
One thing it's important to do for good non-scratchy sound is to allow realtime sound. A message will pop up asking
"If you want to run jackd with realtime priorities, the user starting jackd needs realtime permissions. Accept this option to create the file /etc/security/limits.d/audio.conf, granting realtime priority and memlock privileges to the audio group.......". Answer yes to this, othewise sound quality will be awful.
If like me, you forgot to do that you seem to have to go and remove everything and start again, including all the installed dependencies - but I think the one that really does it is jackd2. I think you also have to restart before the altered privileges take effect properly
To run the system, so far I didnt find a way to set up a menu item for this so I just type monobristol from the command line
If you want to use an external Midi keyboard then you need to virtually patch the keyboard to the synth, which will not happen by itself.
To do this, I use a gui for aconnect called "aconnectgui" (what else?). You can then first select the midi-join icon and patch the synth to the keyboard
Play away - all you need to do now is know how to control all these classic synths!
Really good emulation and a great looking visual reperesentation as well
Since Bristol is by nature executed from the command line I installed the semi-gui front end monobristol that gives a push button selection of each synth type.
simply run this:
sudo apt-get monobristol
Everything else happens by itself
One thing it's important to do for good non-scratchy sound is to allow realtime sound. A message will pop up asking
"If you want to run jackd with realtime priorities, the user starting jackd needs realtime permissions. Accept this option to create the file /etc/security/limits.d/audio.conf, granting realtime priority and memlock privileges to the audio group.......". Answer yes to this, othewise sound quality will be awful.
If like me, you forgot to do that you seem to have to go and remove everything and start again, including all the installed dependencies - but I think the one that really does it is jackd2. I think you also have to restart before the altered privileges take effect properly
To run the system, so far I didnt find a way to set up a menu item for this so I just type monobristol from the command line
If you want to use an external Midi keyboard then you need to virtually patch the keyboard to the synth, which will not happen by itself.
To do this, I use a gui for aconnect called "aconnectgui" (what else?). You can then first select the midi-join icon and patch the synth to the keyboard
Play away - all you need to do now is know how to control all these classic synths!