Carla Patch bay Confusion

[HosAdeeb]

Hi there,
I'm a composer of traditional music, recently got interested in electronic music. I work on a Mageia 9 box.

Let me describe my problems in some detail:

• I wanted to use multiple instances of amSynth, and after some trials and failures I used a bash script to launch all of them, specifying for each instance a preset, a MIDI channel and a name within JACK.

• But then I stumbled on something frustrating: some instances would for no obvious reason decide to die on me! In the middle of composing something...

• And then I found out I have Carla installed, and I used it to build a rack of all the instances I intend to use. All was fine. But...

• Within JACK, no ALSA port appear that would correspond to the synth instances on the Carla rack! Hence, Rosegarden, for example, doesn't see them!

What am I missing here?! How can Carla be useful for me if I can't connect the synths on its rack to a sequencer?

I do appreciate your valuable help.

A million thanks in advance.

Hosam Adeeb Nashed

[tseaver]

@HosAdeeb

Within JACK, no ALSA port appear that would correspond to the synth instances on the Carla rack! Hence, Rosegarden, for example, doesn't see them!

Carla has a "multi-port" mode (run I think via carla-jack-multi), where every plugin has its own ports: but unfortunately, that is a JACK-only feature.

[LAM]

What am I missing here?! How can Carla be useful for me if I can't connect the synths on its rack to a sequencer?

I do appreciate your valuable help.

A million thanks in advance.

Hosam Adeeb Nashed

Works here.

What I did:

1. Launched Qjackctl, with "seq" MIDI driver enabled so you get those nice "midi capture" ports on the left. The first is the Midi Through port, the others are created when Rosegarden is launched.
2. Launched Carla (make sure the engine is in multiple clients process mode, see Settings > Egine in Carla).
3. From Carla added MIDI Split internal plugin, useful to route different MIDI channels to different destinations, and connected the "midi capture" ports to the MIDI Split input port.
4. From Carla added a few Amsynth LV2 plugins, connected everyone of them to a different MIDI Split outlet
5. In Rosegarden setup the different tracks Recording Filters each to a different MIDI channel. In this case Track 1 to MIDI Channel 1, Track 2 to MIDI channel 2 and so on.

Hope it helps.

Attached the Carla project.

[LAM]

BTW, Rosegarden can load DSSI instruments, and amSynth comes also with a DSSI version.

To use it in Rosegraden you can setup your track as follows:

[HosAdeeb]

First of all, I can't thank you enough for your detailed response!

Well, the only bit I had never tried was the MIDI Split plugin. And yes, it did the trick, and it tricked Rosegarden into dealing with the Carla rack without really knowing what was going on.

On another note, trying to use amSynth from within Rosegarden, which I did try many times, in vain, doesn't work for me; the synth editor doesn't really allow me to deal with presets (specifically loading one). Perhaps the version on my distro repository is old-ish... I'll try to find out if that is the case.

So, again, a million thanks for your support!

Hosam Adeeb Nashed