LinuxMusicians

Rosegarden has been around so long this will probably seem dumb to a lot of people, but Rosegarden is alright.

Because it's been around so long, I've tried on numerous occasions to use it, but I pretty much gave up on it as junk. At times it simply wouldn't start and other times, I realize now, my lack of knowledge of Jack, plugins, etc. or the hardware I was using just wasn't up to the task.

Rosegarden is far from ideal, it's awkward and unintuitive in a lot of ways and to use jack midi you need a2jmidid. But, for me, it is superior to Qtractor and Ardour 3. With Qtractor I had difficulty setting the length of notes and with Ardour it was placing the notes exactly that was a chore. With Rosegarden both of those things are simple.

Probably the most frustrating thing is the keybindings, CTL-ENTER to toggle the transport!?! Hey, how about the space bar? And why use Function keys for common tasks? How about something closer to the home row?

It's hardly my dream sequencer, but it seems to be capable of getting the job done. At least until something better comes along.

I always liked its user interface and its editors. Great! Nice people on the mailing lists, too. Great for people with only a little need for audio tracks. Superdupergreat if you need score notation/edit.

Its weak side is the lack of LV2 support and its handling of audio segments: you get a hell of files where it's difficult to check out if they are still used. You get crashes when recording and deleting and recording and deleting audio. Sometimes audio segments don't get played (a Rosegarden restart helps). Its biggest bug is a broken latency compensation of audio tracks. Adding plugins with some latency on synth tracks brings your audio segments out of sync.

I could work around these issues:
- Recording audio segments with Audacity
- Align audio segments in the last stage

Rosegarden's mixer is also missing send/return but I didn't miss it in real songs.

I still love Rosegarden but I tried Qtractor which doesn't have these issues. Its mixer becomes confusing with lots of tracks. Maybe Rui will find the time to align the mixer strips in 3 rows some day That would help much.