Using such tools you get a full studio within one application, which some people find very handy, but on the other hand it leaves you a bit less room for customizing your workplace. They automatically detects your hardware and lets you play some music immediately. These digital audio workstations are usually really huge, and provide you with basic features you may need – that is notation editor, sequencers, synthesizers and recording tools ( while sometimes free, such studio-applications require you sometimes to pay thousands of dollars to unlock professional features). On Windows/Mac you were probably welcomed with some cool music-studio application that is usually included with the MIDI controller, and installs alongside drivers. It needs some aid to be able to produce sound – an application capable of behaving as synthesizer. How can it know what sound to play? The MIDI controller itself is not a synthesizer and it does not know much about sound, it is just meant to send keypresses and controller movement to a host device (your Ubuntu computer in this case). Okay, so it has successfully connected, but it plays no sound when I press a key. Well, it won’t display a message, but you can ensure it has found the controller by running aconnect -i which lists all readable MIDI ports – your controller’s name will be included in the list too! ( By the way, that makes me wonder why does other systems needs drivers for that…) Just plug it in a free USB slot and ALSA will immediately discover it. Therefore, since ALSA supports that standard, Ubuntu users need no additional drivers to use such keyboards. It turns out that ALSA manages to communicate with 100% USB MIDI controllers! The trick is that MIDI over USB is a common standard that every single USB controller uses. That’s not surprising, since nobody would need them. I have never seen a USB MIDI keyboard that would have drivers for Linux included in it’s package. It’s great to get started in a very short time! In my post, I will explain some details on how (and why) this works and how you can use custom setups to your liking.įirst things required to use external keyboard are drivers. S.fox has recently posted a great guide on how to connect your USB keyboard with Ubuntu and get it to play some sounds in few easy steps. No doubt this may discourage Ubuntu users from buying such controller, but is Linux really a not supported platform?Īnd, by the way, how to setup a working set of music applications, that will allow one to compose & perform music (regardless of whether you have an external keyboard or not) ? Therefore it is common to see a note on their box that one needs Windows/Mac to use the instrument. Usually they are shipped with a CD that contains a Windows/Mac drivers & some music-making applications. If you own an external USB MIDI controller (keyboard) or plan to buy one, you may be interested in how these things work with Ubuntu.
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