Re: MIDI suggestions?

On Tue, 1 Feb 2022 18:06:43 -0500, Mason Loring Bliss wrote:
>Hi all. I've got a Radio Shack LK-1261 and a USB midi adapter, and it
>seems to show up correctly. I've looked at Debian and the software
>stack is a bit perplexing, and I'd like to drive it on FreeBSD.

Hi,

I doubt that the "software stack" is much different on FreeBSD, let
alone that the audio production/MIDI infrastructure on Linux is likely
easier to use.

USB MIDI probably is ok for your usage. So just for your information,
USB MIDI is a little bit fishy. It usually has got a higher amount of
MIDI jitter than other MIDI computer interfaces and you can't trust in
proper galvanic isolation.

>My goal is to be able to use the keyboard to input notes and then be
>able to normalize and manipulate the data in something computer-side,
>and then ideally send the results back through the keyboard to play
>using the keyboard's built-in voices/instruments and one way or the
>other (keyboard involved or not) render finished pieces into WAV or
>FLAC or something I can use in still other tools.

You need a MIDI sequencer and a hard disk recorder, IOW a digital audio
workstation. The MIDI sequencer is used to record MIDI events and to
quantise the note on and note off events. You can either use synth
plugins to play sounds or MIDI out to play your keyboard's sounds.

Ardour is a professional hard disk recorder with a rudimentary, more or
less unusable MIDI sequencer. Qtractor isn't professional grade, but
provides a quite usable MIDI sequencer, but rudimentary hard disk
recorder.

I would suggest to start testing Qtractor, since the MIDI sequencer
is quite alright and fluidsynth-dssi to play so called sound fonts.
Sound fonts are available for free by some googling.

https://www.freshports.org/audio/qtractor/
https://www.freshports.org/audio/fluidsynth-dssi/

If you want to have fun, let alone if you ever should need professional
audio/MIDI software, consider to migrate back to Apple. After using the
C64 and Atari ST synced to an analog tape recorder, I used to use Linux
(not FreeBSD) for audio and MIDI. Today I'm using Apple ;).

Regards,
Ralf