MS-DOS / Linux Pattern Sequenzer for old Laptop?

[esaias]

Is there any small MIDI sequenzer software for MS-DOS or Linux.

I have Toshiba T3200 and it has ISA slot, I was thinking of puttin a MIDI-interface in it and running some sequenzer software in it but I haven't been able to find any. The Drummer looked nice but there is only demo avail.

    -Tomi

[stryd_one]

Seq24  :)

[DrBunsen]

Shareware Music Machine:  DOS and Linux

Harmony Central:  DOS

You could also try AGNULA: a complete GNU/Linux Audio distribution and Dyne:bolic

The ultimate setup (maybe) would be a good ISA Soundblaster with one of the sequencer programs with editing support for the onboard FM synth, and a Yamaha XG daughtercard.

[stryd_one]

Once upon a  time, there was a thread where we were discussing the hardware seq which has now given birth to the sram module monster ;)

Some of the people on the thread discussed an embedded PC running linux, and so after my time away, and with the recent activity on the linux audio scene, I thought, maybe this really is worth a try....

Well, long story short.... Linux still crashes, just like windows. Back to dedicated hardware for me.

BTW, I tried dyne:bolic, agnula, and Planet CCRMA FC3 and found them all to be rather good. Dyne:bolic is pretty darned cool but hard to install or upgrade stuff as it's built from scratch and that means no package manager.. Agnula was too buggy. I'll be using CCRMA FC3 for hard disk recording. But certainly nothing as complex as realtime midi sequencing. I think a system that crashes and has strange bugs sometimes is not quite what I'd call "ultimate" ;)

[moebius]

Well, long story short.... Linux still crashes, just like windows

Please explain?

Some userspace proggie does some silly things? And brings the whole system down?

Back to dedicated hardware for me.

Dedicated hardware or not - Why not try an embedded linux?

bye, Moebius

You know - it fits in the modern motherboards BIOS flash :)

[stryd_one]

Well just the apps crash, and writing stuff for MIDI generally means using something like Jack for example,and tk or some other thing for the gui,etc etc... Which means dealing with far more features than the minimum necessary for the job, and an unfinished application. Hardware drivers etc also cause problems... As they are mostly made not by the hardware devs but by individuals who dev'd something that the hardware manufaturers never really intended....  Of course, you can start writing your own stuff but it really means a massive job and basically reinventing the wheel.

The whole reason I don't want to use one of the admittedly excellent packages available (Oh my gosh, numerology is so cool, and I love sonar) is because of the lack of stability in winblows/wackOS... So why start developing the sequencer on a platform that lacks stability itself, when I can develop the same functionality based on MBHP/MIOS - I could be wrong about this, but I don't think I've ever seen a post on this forum where the MBHP platform has crashed without the reason being found and fixed - and most often it is due to some kind of user error. PC based OS's often crash and leave you with nothing but a silent mystery. (not cool during a live PA!)

I don't know, in general, due to the nature of the beast, linux just seems to be one great big works in progress... Maybe in 5 or 10 years it will be a little closer to being a finished product...

Also, I came across a great many apps which looked fantastic, but were only 3 /4 finished... Sometimes they were just abandonded, sometimes the developer decided to start work on a new project... It doesn't exactly instill a feeling of confidence when you start using application version 0.whatever...

Using embedded linux on specialised hardware seems to have similar issues, as once again there are far more features available in the kernel than the bare necessities for the job. The move away from simplicity seems to be a move towards problems. Like I often say in my IT work, more features = more things to go wrong.

But if you feel like designing a new specialised hardware platform and the software to run on it which is as far advanced as MIOS already is, count me in for dev'ing a sequencer for it!  :D

[DrBunsen]

There's a LiveCD called Bark which is preconfigured to use Jack.  It's only available from the developer for now (0.6 version) - PM me if you want his email address. 

[AndrewMartens]

I successfully ran a small pattern sequencer called "TTRK" (tektracker) on a P120/32 laptop with a 2.2 Debian install.    It's made by a guy named Billy Biggs - http://vektor.ca/audio/ttrk/

At the time I made a few modifications to it, mostly because I didn't like how the scrolling setup worked.  I may have backed up that code somewhere, I'm not sure.  I got the thing working, but I only had a serial output on the laptop, and when I ran it into a Windows 98 desktop I experienced some jitter when passing the data through to hardware MIDI gear (probably Windows-related, but I'm not sure). 

If you've got linux-supported MIDI on your laptop, it would be a good program to use - it runs very nicely in the console, so you don't need to worry about X hogging any CPU time.  I think I ended up running as root in singleuser mode, but it worked well.