Using Rosegarden with recorded audio files?

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Jimi-James
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Using Rosegarden with recorded audio files?

Post by Jimi-James »

I've read the Rosegarden manual and looked around the program itself, as well as Googled and searched this forum, and I can't find what I'm looking for or figure it out myself (and I might be looking in the wrong place for all I know). I'm 100% new to MIDI, synths, and everything else Rosegarden does besides reading/writing notation. I want to take sounds I've made from recording them and messing with them and get them to a state in Rosegarden where I can write notation for them (including shifting the pitch for different notes).
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Re: Using Rosegarden with recorded audio files?

Post by raboof »

Jimi-James wrote:I want to take sounds I've made from recording them and messing with them and get them to a state in Rosegarden where I can write notation for them (including shifting the pitch for different notes).
So basically you write notes in Rosegarden, which Rosegarden outputs as MIDI note events when playing back your score.

Then you need some kind of application to turn those MIDI note events into sounds. Such an application could be a sampler like QSynth. To configure a sampler like QSynth, you load a 'soundfont'/'sample sets' into it which contains the actual sounds. QSynth will take care of playing the right sound when it receives a MIDI note event.

Soundfonts of varying quality are available online, both free and proprietary.

If you want something more unique, you can come up with your own 'soundfonts'. I remember using the sampler-like application called 'specimen' for that ( http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/apps/all/specimen ) - it seems that project is abandoned but a fork has been created in the form of petri-foo ( http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/apps/all/petri-foo ), might be worth checking out.
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Re: Using Rosegarden with recorded audio files?

Post by Jimi-James »

Thanks! I think I should be able to figure it out from here. I thought it had something to do with importing audio files into Rosegarden, but I guess I need to learn Qsynth. A college class I started between now and when I first made this topic has actually taught me how a synth works, so Qsynth makes a LOT more sense now.
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Re: Using Rosegarden with recorded audio files?

Post by raboof »

Jimi-James wrote:I thought it had something to do with importing audio files into Rosegarden
Ah yes - you can import audio file into Rosegarden to have them played along-side your MIDI/notation tracks, but they're largely independent. I can see how that could be confusing.
Jimi-James wrote:I guess I need to learn Qsynth
QSynth is a nice start, but if you want to use your own samples perhaps there's easier stuff out there.
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Re: Using Rosegarden with recorded audio files?

Post by Jimi-James »

What kind of program would be best for an extreme level of sound manipulation? A sampler? I have jsampler installed, but I haven't checked it out and I don't know if it's the best for that. Or is it petri-foo?
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Re: Using Rosegarden with recorded audio files?

Post by nate »

After re-reading the posts by the OP I'm still not certain exactly what you're trying to do, but I think we're trying to do the same thing. I think you're wanting to transcribe audio files from something you recorded, and I suspect you're hoping for an automatic solution. The auto solution is a no go, but there are programs around (like Transcribe!) which can make suggestions about what notes are being played, as well as the basic functions of slow down and looping.

Even though Rosegarden isn't really intended for transcription, it seems to be a good solution, simply because it's the only package I'm aware of that does both notation editing and transport controls for audio. It's handy to have them together for this IMO. In my case I have the original multitracks I recorded earlier, so I can cut out everything but the vocal part I want to transcribe, hammer it out on a MIDI track, listen to them in isolation, then replace.

I couldn't figure the Pitch Tracker in Rosegarden out, and I was disasspointed with the Waon transcription of my vocal parts. Guitar was a little better, but still not usable. (It doesn't really handle harmonics well, so even though I was playing a compressed, low pass filtered monophonic guitar part, it still showed up as three or more notes).
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Re: Using Rosegarden with recorded audio files?

Post by Jimi-James »

Thanks. It's a year later, so I've figured a lot out now, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to transpose one audio file into the other notes. Thinking about it now, it makes perfect sense that I can't do that. I'll keep that Transcribe program in mind.
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Re: Using Rosegarden with recorded audio files?

Post by nate »

LOL, it sure is. Almost exactly. I didn't even notice the year, just the date and thought "oh this is recent".

Transcribe! isn't freeware, but it's not expensive ($40US) and it does run on Linux. I own a license but I've misplaced mine. I'm still deciding about buying it again. Leaning towards not because I have some ideas about how to get closer to what I want.
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Re: Using Rosegarden with recorded audio files?

Post by DepreTux »

As mentioned above, you need a sampler to load your recordings on. The sampler will change the playback speed of your recording to match the MIDI pitch. You would then connect the MIDI output of Rosegarden into the MIDI input of the selected sampler.

There are a few wavetable samplers for linux, the ones that come to mind first are petri-foo and samplev1, but there surely are others.

Trackers such as schism tracker of milkytracker are also based on wavetable synthesis (transposing a recorded fragment to the needed pitch) but they are intended to be used with their own sequencers, and it takes some RTFM to use them.
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