[SOLVED]Rosegarden Does Not Work On Mageia 9

[banjo]

I am trying to get Rosegarden to work in Mageia 9. I spent several days with nothing but silence. I tried every trick that I used in Mageia 8 to get it to work, but to no avail. Here is a pointer to that other thread.

https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=14560

The odd thing is that the tiny MIDI sequencer in Frescobaldi works when running in the same environment. I typeset music in Frescobaldi using LilyPond, and have it create a MIDI file so i can listen to it.

I have QSynth running and also jackd running. Frescobaldi connects with Jack fine. Here is the port information for Frescobaldi.

Screenshot_20240621_154525.png (59.44 KiB) Viewed 3935 times

When I run Rosegarden, it appears to connect to the same port.

Screenshot_20240621_154706.png (52.65 KiB) Viewed 3935 times

Frescobaldi played notes, but Rosegarden was silent.

I installed MusE to see if I can get that to work, and all I got was silence.

I installed Qtractor, and I also got silence.

I spent a few days randomly changing parameters until I found that if I turn off the option in Rosegarden to start up the jackd, I could get one note out of the sequencer.

RosegardenDisableJackStart.png (68.22 KiB) Viewed 3935 times

I guess Rosegarden was starting another jackd that wasn't connected to anything? Just guessing.

Anyway, after I got Rosegarden to sound one note, I followed the instructions at this website.

https://www.rosegardenmusic.com/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions#only_notes_at_the_very_start_of_the_composition_are_played_at_all

I went through the settings of the "Sequencer timing source" and found that the selection, "PCM playback 2-0-0" makes Rosegarden step through the notes at about one beat per second. All the other settings give me just the one note.

Changing the tempo of the MIDI has no effect on the playback speed. All I get is bad sounding notes at about one beat per second.

All my other sound seems to work. After installing the VLC plugin, vlc-plugin-fluidsynth, VLC can play the MIDI. That works without having Qsynth running at all, so it might have its own synth.

I am so confused. Does anyone know of a description of how all this stuff ties together so I can trouble shoot this instead of just trying random things to see what happens?

Any help getting either of the other MIDI sequencers working would be useful as well.

inxi info

Code: Select all

$ inxi -b
System:
  Host: linux8corem9 Kernel: 6.6.28-desktop-1.mga9 arch: x86_64 bits: 64
    Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 5.27.10 Distro: Mageia 9
Machine:
  Type: Desktop Mobo: Micro-Star model: MPG Z590 GAMING PLUS (MS-7D07) v: 2.0
    serial: <superuser required> UEFI: American Megatrends LLC. v: A.10
    date: 04/09/2021
CPU:
  Info: 8-core 11th Gen Intel Core i7-11700K [MT MCP] speed (MHz): avg: 803
    min/max: 800/4900:5000
Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA GA106 [Geforce RTX 3050] driver: nvidia v: 550.78
  Display: x11 server: X.org v: 1.21.1.8 with: Xwayland v: 22.1.9 driver: X:
    loaded: nvidia,v4l gpu: nvidia,nvidia-nvswitch resolution: 1: 1920x1080~60Hz
    2: 1920x1080~60Hz
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 550.78 renderer: NVIDIA GeForce RTX
    3050/PCIe/SSE2
Network:
  Device-1: Intel Ethernet I225-V driver: igc
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 1.82 TiB used: 240.44 GiB (12.9%)
Info:
  Processes: 397 Uptime: 9h 50m Memory: 31.25 GiB used: 3.66 GiB (11.7%)
  Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.26

Thanks
Banjo
(_)=='=~

[morgano]

This is not my cup of tea, but have tried switching soundserver?
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Pipewire

Talking about Rosegarden we have other bug reports you maybe have inputs to
https://bugs.mageia.org/buglist.cgi?qui ... =rosegarde

[banjo]

I did see those other bugs, but they don't seem to be related to what I am dealing with.

I tried to use Pipewire in Qsynth, but it threw errors saying that it could not set it up.

The good news is that through trial and error I did manage to figure out the secret sauce that got Rosegarden to play the MIDI files. I don't know why it works, but it does work. So I thought I would capture the setup that I used in case someone else runs into this problem. I suspect that this would make more sense to me if I had a better knowledge of how the sound makes its way through the software systems, but I have not been able to find a clear description of that yet.

First of all, I had to set up Qsynth to use alsa_seq for the MIDI driver and jack for the Audio Driver.

QsynthWorkingSetup.png (105.74 KiB) Viewed 3890 times

Then, I had to set up Rosegarden to turn off the option to start jack automatically. Jack is started by Qsynth. I also had to choose a sequencer timing source, which turned out to be "PCM playback 2-0-0". I do not know what this is, but it is the only one that works. The other choices result in just one note being sounded.

RosegardenWorkingSetup.png (174.89 KiB) Viewed 3890 times

An interesting additional bit of information is also available from Qjackctl. That tool has a graphical representation of the connections that exist. Here is what it shows when Rosegarden is operating properly.

RosegardenWorkingConnections.png (202.38 KiB) Viewed 3890 times

I don't use any of the capture connections shown in that map, but I suppose that if I hooked up a MIDI keyboard it would get mixed into the output.

I am going to mark this SOLVED because Rosegarden is working now, but I wish there were a better way of puzzling this out other than trial and error.

The proper sequence to use in order to get the sound to work is to first start up Qsynth and then open the MIDI file in Rosegarden.

[morgano]

Glad you got it working.
Great you documented it