Installing and Using Rosegarden MIDI Sequencer under Slackware Linux 12.0

Notes on compiling:

Regarding Qjackctl, and Qsynth:

You can't compile or use the latest versions, which rely on Qt4 -- you only have Qt3. You can use the latest stable that use Qt3, and it is a worthwhile pursuit. Upgrading Qt is non trivial, and may strand you in VMH (version mis-match Hell). You don't want to be stranded in VMH.

I originally installed and used Rosegarden on my Thinkpad T43 which now appears to have lost the use of its drive controller, but then I installed it on my IBM M50 desktop. The Thinkpad required some tweaking to make everything work well, the M50 less so.

I have used Rosegarden with Fluidsynth, Jack, Qsynth, and QJack to compose and render music for a video -- it turned out great.

In order to get it going, I also installed Audacity, and was able to record the output from Jack to a WAV file.

I should note that although my Jack racks up occasional XRUNs, even after taking the prescribed precautions of using non-journalling file system, etc, the recording by Audacity ends up being flawless, regardless of XRUNs, since apparently they affect the real-time playback, but are only pauses in the stream, not missing data. Put another way, even if your Jackd glitches as you play back the composition to record it in Audacity, the file that Audacity saves will be flawless.

An example output from a Rosegarden composition, rendered with Qsynth/fluidsynth, with the PC51f SoundFont, through JACK to Audacity:
rocketsong.mp3 (1.4 MB).