Robert
Kingston's Website
Classical Music
I have LP's of Classical Music going back to the mid-60's which sat
unused for years until I discovered that I could digitise them using my
Sansui SR222 Mk2 (which I got in 1972) a stereo preamp box, an
Audigy box connected to my PC and Audacity running in Linux. I had a
few problems withn scratches until I found that washing the LP's
carefully in warm soapy water and drying them off works wonders. I have
even found that playing them before they are completely dry (but not
wet!) makes them sound like new and doesn't seem to do the needle any
harm either! I don't take any responsibility if you try this and it
wrecks your needle, as it may all depend on my ancient Ortofon being so
good.
So now as well as my records I have digitised versions of them on my
hard disk that sound wonderful, the odd scratch gving an authentic feel
to it. I have tried 'Clean' running under Windows ME to take out the
few scrathes that remain but I have to say I had no success with it. I
don't know if anyone can recommend a software scratch remover they have
found really works.
MIDI
I entered the world of MIDI about ten years ago when I doscovered I
could download some really meaty versions of new hymns and worship
songs from various websites. The fact that these can be tweaked to
change the tempo, pitch and instruments used makes listening to music
this way very interesting indeed. I was put down to learning the piano
when I was young but with no success and to be able to interact with
music through MIDI makes it very exciting indeed. All the fun without
the drudgery of having to practice.
I have been struggling hard in Linux to get to the point I was at in
Windows. The downloading is no problem and playing with Timidity is
fine. In fact some of the voices in Timidity, especially the organ,
sound better than anything I have come across in Windows. However
Timidity refuses to recognise some drum tracks making those
pieces
seem very flat and I have not had the time to work out what is going
wrong.
Unfortunatley, when it comes to editing I am in trouble. Rosegarden
just doesn't seem to want to know about the JACK that comes with
PCLinuxOS. Editing in it, taking a guess at where I am in the tune from
the shape of the piano roll, is very similar to Cakewalk and works
fine, but that is as far as I can go because it will not save any
edits, complaining that I do not have sndfile-convert installed. The
package manager insists it is installed so I am not sure where we go
from there.
MusE happily links up with JACK allowing JACK to start, stop, play back
and so on, but no sound comes out the other end no matter how I try to
reconfigure JACK and MusE. I reckon the problem must be with
the
AC97 sound card in my ACER 3003WLMI or with the alsa set up
but
all the searches I have made on the web have yielded nothing helpful.
MusE seems to be very like the Cubasis that came with my
Creative
sound card and the Ejay Studio I started off with. I can edit away in
it, again guessing where I am in the track and have succesfully changed
tempo, pitch rallentando and so on exporting the edited MIDI files with
no problems. I keep Timidity running alongside MusE, using it to check
my edits after saving and this works fine. Curiously when I play a MusE
edited MIDI file in Timidity I get no 'file conflict' warnings. In
Windows playing a file in one program that was being edited in another
was just not on. It seems odd that Timidity can play through the AC97
fine while JACK doesn't seem to.