Just a small moment of triumph, kinda. With the reformatting of the main computer under Ubuntu Studio now (a form of Linux operating system,) I had to reinstall several different things that I’d been using, and among them was the MIDI keyboard. MIDI is just a musical interface to take an electronic input (such as a small piano-style keyboard, as opposed to what I’m typing on right now) and create music with it. Or, discordant banging around. Linux does not play well with MIDI out-of-the-box, and needs a lot of formatting to recognize it and send it through multiple layers into whatever software you actually want to use, and this is where I give Windows full credit, because for all of the times that I’ve had to download new drivers and support software and ridiculous doodads for Windows programs, Direct-X and .Net framework and so on, it recognizes a MIDI keyboard effortlessly and with no extra fudging about.
But Linux, boy howdy! ALSA and Jack and PulseAudio and formatting input/output channels can take a while, and much longer when something fails to work and you end up trying to troubleshoot the issue. Notably, the audio handler PulseAudio is widely recognized to be both problematic and almost superfluous, and I was attempting to avoid it altogether to use its much-improved replacement, Pipewire.
Long story short: Ubuntu Studio came with most of this installed but not at all configured, and my attempts to use Pipewire came to naught. I did get the system working with just about a ground-up reinstall and reformat of the whole path, using PulseAudio, and can now produce the same vaguely musical sounds from the main system that I had been before. And, from the Backup Server as well, which has two operating systems determined at boot, Linux Mint and Windows 7; the MIDI interface is through Windows because it has a much more versatile bit of software (Reason Lite 11.) In Ubuntu I’m using Rosegarden, which works fine but hasn’t anywhere near the instrument variety without a lot more playing around. I’m also using Hydrogen as a drum emulator. Ubuntu Studio has a ton of pre-installed software for music production (and video, and graphics,) and I will be trying those out eventually. Right now, I can do what I was doing before. so I’m back on track.
Now, how long it’s going to take me to compose the new music that I’ve been meaning to get to, that’s another matter…
