..:: seize the day ::..

The title is a bit intriguing. But it is true you can use your linux machine to expand your ability to play your favorite musical instrument. This story is based on my experience. In Windows world you have programs like GuitarPro and PowerTab to make musical transcription for guitar. In Linux there are many alternatives you can use, I should mentioned here KGuitar, DGuitar, and TuxGuitar.

I use TuxGuitar to make transcription, open gp3, gp4 and gp5 files from GuitarPro, and practice my guitar playing with it. The format of file produce by TuxGuitar is .tg. I also use it to export the result to midi files, and try to play it with the midi player for linux,  TiMidity++. TuxGuitar by far is the most advance and complete linux software for guitar player and can be compared with GuitarPro. Sometimes I use DGuitar to open gp3, gp4, gp5 files from my friend. I use DGuitar just to hear the sound.

The other thing I needed to get the decent sound for TuxGuitar is FluidSynth and its GUI wrapper Qsynth. FluidSynth is a command line software synthesiser based on the soundfont specification, and Qsynth is a fluidsynth GUI front-end application written in C++ around the Qt4 toolkit using Qt Designer. After Qsynth installation we need several free soundfont that can be download from the web. Of course to be able to hear all the sound, we sholud make sure that the sound card in PC is working, and it supports ALSA.

To make your system a little bit complete you can add TiMidity++ as your midi player. TiMidity++ is a software synthesizer. It can play MIDI files by converting them into PCM waveform data; give it a MIDI data along with digital instrument data files, then it synthesizes them in real-time, and plays. It can not only play sounds, but also can save the generated waveforms into hard disks as various audio file formats.

All the setup above is enough for hobbyist like me, I just play the guitar for hobby and play a gig once in while just for fun. For you who need more (maybe you’re professional) you can add Rosegarden and NoteEdit. Rosegarden is a well-rounded audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment. NoteEdit is a free music score editor for Linux, it supports an unlimited number and length of staffs, polyphony, a MIDI playback of written notes, chord markings, lyrics, a number of import and export filters to many formats like MIDI, MusicXML, ABC Music, MUP, PMX, MusiXTeX and LilyPond and other.

If still not enough, openSUSE, my prefer distribution, go further with the JAD (Jacklab Audio Distribution). It is based on openSUSE 10.2, and apply a special real time kernel. It implements JACK, it can connect a number of different applications to an audio device, as well as allowing them to share audio between themselves. JACK is a low-latency audio server, that’s why JAD use the special real time kernel that have low latency. JAD also already include several packages that I mentioned above.

Installation (tested in my openSUSE 11.0 installation) 

In this section I give you step-by-step installation of TuxGuitar for openSUSE11.0, mainly using 1-click install from webpin. Other distribution please search your repositories or use the tarball from the respective website.

1. Make sure your soundcard is working.
2. Install TuxGuitar with 1-click install from webpin. If you want to install it by yourself please download it from here.
3. Install Qsynth with 1-click install from webpin. If you want to build it by yourself please download it from here. If you build it don’t forget to install Qt4 and fluidsynth. This is not the case for 1-click install because it will install the dependencies. After installation click Setup and select Audi Tab, and make sure you select alsa as Audio Driver (you can also Install jack and use jack as Audio Driver)
4. Download SGM-V2.01 soundfont from here (actually I don’t know the license for this soundfont, but because it is on the net I assume it is free. If someone, or you perhaps, know that it is violating the license please drop me an email and I will remove this line). Most of the time this soundfont is enough for me. It maps almost all the midi sount from GuitarPro files correctly. But if you need to experiment a bit you can also download some free soundfons from here. I use FluidR3, StevesLesPaul-R5 and JV1080 from this site. You should load the soundfont to Qsynth from setup - soundfont. You need a tool to extract the SGM-V2.01and FluidR3 .sfark files to be a .sf2 file so it can be readed by Qsytnh. For this task, you can use a windows program from here and run it from wine.
5. As an optional, install TiMidity++ with 1-click install from webpin. 

Try the software

User experience is something that hard to be explained. You should make yourself to get use with the software, before you can say any comment about that. According to my experience there are several thing we should take care

1. Always run the Qsynth before opening TuxGuitar. And set the TuxGuitar sound on Tools-Sound with Midi Sequencer set to TuxGuitar Sequencer and Midi Port set to Synth input port (which Qsynth reside).
2. Most of the time I can play correctly .gp* files with SGM-V2.01 soundfont, but sometimes the musical instrument doesn’t sound correctly. If so, we should do trial and error by assigning the right instrument to the midi channel by setting it in Qsynth  Channels.
3. It is good to check the result of midi with TiMidity++. Export the file you created in TuxGuitar and play it with TiMidity++ and hear the result.

Don’t be afraid to try different sound and experimenting a bit.

OK. That’s all folks. Happy playing with your guitar and do experiment with the TuxGuitar and Qsynth. Have fun.