LinuxMusicians

It also should be mentioned that AVLinux is built with the no-update concept. It provides lots of linux audio/video apps in an audio-optimized setup with the idea of providing a stable AV setup which will not be disrupted by updates. However, with care one can update or add new packages, if one is c...

Audacity has lousy Jack support using PortAudio which makes Jack connects dynamically, ie. when you hit record or playback. There are no static connections like other Jack applications. However, this is a compile-time option, so your version of Audacity may or may not have this feature. It would als...

Judging from others comments non-session seems to be recommended. Another approach is to use shell scripts to start programs and then aj-snapshot to restore all connections: http://aj-snapshot.sourceforge.net/

Make sure you are using updated LV2 code which you can get from here: http://drobilla.net/. Also if you use an Audio-centric linux distro like AVLinux, kxstudio, Dreamstudio, etc you won't have to build all this stuff yourself.

It is unfortunately true that one has to do a fair amount of research to make sure an audio device will work in linux. There is not a single manufacturer which supplies drivers for linux so either one has to be careful to buy either class-compliant USB 1.1 or 2.0 audio devices or carefully check the...

Akai supplies a program which you can use to program the midi keyboard. This is a windows program but will work perfectly with wine. For example, my Akai LPD8 keyboard I run the program like this: "wine LPD8\ Editor.exe". Since you are new, I'll mention that wine is a program which can run...

There exists USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 sound standards and any device supporting those standards should work in linux. One way to know this is to check whether drivers are needed for the device on a Mac. If no special driver is needed then the device follows one of the standards, if a special driver is ne...

I'm sorry I don't use VJ software so I cannot help you on that one.

I suggest contacting the developers of linuxsampler and fluildsynth if you think those applications do not process your soundfont correctly. For example submit a query to the linuxsampler-dev email list - see http://www.linuxsampler.org/developers.html

As for distros I favor AVLinux and kxstudio. For midi sequencers I suggest qtractor, Muse, Ardour3 or Rosegarden. For DJ software look at Mixx. I don't know which combination is the best to do the midi control you want. However, with Jack on linux it is easy to interconnect audio and midi between ap...

I would say that to do what you want to do you must use Jack. With Jack you could then use Ardour, Qtractor, Muse, Rosegarden, or other linux DAWs. Without Jack linux has little to offer for pro audio work, only Audacity which has limitations that you noted. The main reason that I could see why Jack...

I notice your links above do not work, but these do (incremental version number increase):
http://www.rncbc.org/snapshots/samplv1- ... 769.tar.gz
http://www.rncbc.org/snapshots/synthv1- ... 769.tar.gz
Thanks for the updates

Concerning Ardour and real-time rendering you could always create a new audio track, record your synth track into the audio track, then disable the synth track. This is also desirable because it then saves CPU time to not re-render the synth all the time.

There is jack-smf-utils: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jack-smf-utils/ However, I do not know if it sends midi clock messages.

It sounds like you started jack using your internal soundcard rather than your USB interface. You need to select the interface on the "Setup" tab of qjackctl. I suggest you make presets so you can easily change between your internal soundcard and USB interface. Here is a nice tutorial on Q...