LinuxMusicians

OK,

For a long time, I was using hydrogen. This is a great app and I even tried to improve myself between sound takes, chit-chat and other things. But I was not satisfied, despite my hours spent in mixing the different elements, the crashes it triggered, etc.

So I looked for an alternative that would sound good AND be easy to use. I heard of ppl that could run a windows soft called Addictive Drums through Wine and DSSI-VST. I picked up the demo from the AD website (xlnaudio.com). ANd all I can say is WOW! So I bought the DVD (a bit pricy ...) and installed it, and now, I have THE app for my drumming needs!. It integrates so well thanks to wine and dssi, you can use it as flawlessly as you would on windows. Everything works, it is super light in terms of CPU and takes little RAM. The drumkits sound really cool, the mixing capability is outstanding, and the routing as good as you could hope for.

So this is not so much kudos for this soft than for the Wine and DSSI folks. Great great job!

If someone is adventurous enough to try it, I can help. It will require a fresh install of wine - 0.9.58 preferably (no dll messing up with win32 native stuff, pure wine dlls are required as far as I can tell).

Moreover, I use another VSTi in the same way : Pianoteq. If you were looking for real sounding grand piano with a very detailed expression, velocity, etc (not sample based), pianoteq is THE solution for PC. Forget about huge sample library, etc. This soft just produces the right sound, down to the noise the expression pedal makes when pressed! you can adjust so many things (hammer noise level, reverb, piano size, etc). Just the presets sound good but you can fiddle around so much, you cannot believe it.

Once again, kudos to wine and dssi folks!

I've messed around with Hydrogen. (It hasn't crashed on me.)

In general what does a drum machine provide you with that Rosegarden (for example - probably Ardour too) don't? Rosegarden has drum pattern and editing. I was thinking that I should just be using Rosegarden and not going to the trouble of creating my patterns in Hydrogen and then importing them into Rosegarden.

I'm really new at this, so I'm still trying to figure out the big picture here...

rosegarden is a MIDI sequencer so you need software plugins to associate sounds to your sequenced patterns. Hydrogen is mixing both (sequencing and sampling) but in its own internal format, though it understands MIDI (you can play hydrogen from your h/w keyboard for exemple) and record MIDI events in it.

What I complain about in hydrogen and other linux drumming apps (jackbeat for ex) is the lack of realism in the end. I tried hard with mixing to produce real sounding drums but you first need a realistic sample lib (like the excellent Natural Drum Kit or the free version formerly called ns_kit7free). Once again, you run into another problem with those : RAM usage. Hydrogen loads all the drumkit into RAM. The NDK is 20G so you cannot possibly use it all. So you have to create your own custom kits and that it a bit of a project in itself.
So the alternative is to use Addictive Drums as the drum sampler and mixer, and rosegarden at what it does best : midi sequencing. You just plug AD to one MIDI track in rosegarden (in the STudio -> manage MIDI devices, you can declare Addictive Drums - if it's already up and running through dssi-vst host, then you can associate it to any MIDI track you have in the rosegarden composition window) and the fun can begin : create your drum pattern in the piano roll, edit them on the fly as rosegarden rolls on, etc.