Rosegarden

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Rosegarden

Rosegarden 1.0 under Linux
Developer:	Chris Cannam, Richard Bown, Guillaume Laurent
Latest release:	1.4.0 / September 19, 2006
OS:	GNU/Linux
Use:	Digital Audio Workstation
License:	GPL
Website:	www.rosegardenmusic.com

Rosegarden is a free software digital audio workstation program developed for GNU/Linux with ALSA and KDE. It acts as an audio and MIDI sequencer, scorewriter and musical composition and editing tool. It is intended to be a free replacement for such applications as Cubase.

Rosegarden does not provide a built-in software synthesizer, so it requires a hardware MIDI synthesizer, a soft synthesizer such as FluidSynth or Timidity, or a synthesizer plugin in order to make any sound from MIDI compositions. Recent versions of Rosegarden support the DSSI software synthesizer plugin interface, and can use some Windows VST plugins through an adapter.

The current Rosegarden program was originally named Rosegarden-4, to distinguish it from a previous program by the same authors called Rosegarden 2.1. Rosegarden 2.1 is very limited, but works stably on a wide variety of Unix-like operating systems and other platforms such as OpenVMS. In contrast, because Rosegarden-4 uses the Linux ALSA system, it only runs in a very limited manner on non-Linux systems [1].

The Rosegarden project was started in 1993 at the University of Bath. Rosegarden 2.1 was released under the GPL in 1997; Rosegarden-4 began in April 2000. Version 1.0 was released on February 14, 2005 (St. Valentine's Day) and version 1.2.4 on July 14, 2006 (Bastille Day).

Rosegarden's lead developers are Chris Cannam, Richard Bown and Guillaume Laurent.

[edit] Features

MIDI and audio playback and recording with ALSA and JACK
Piano-roll, score, event list and track overview editors
DSSI synth and audio effects plugin support, including Windows VST effects and instrument support via dssi-vst
LADSPA audio effects plugin support
JACK transport support for synchronisation with other software
Ability to build and run without JACK, for MIDI-only use
Score interpretation of performance MIDI data
Shareable device (.rgd) files to ease MIDI portability
Triggered segments for pattern sequencing & performable ornaments
Audio and MIDI mixers
MIDI and Hydrogen file import
MIDI, Csound, Lilypond and MusicXML file export (including PostScript and PDF output file generation of score)
User interface translations for Russian, Spanish, German, French, Welsh, Italian, Swedish, Estonian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Dutch, Czech, Catalan, and Finnish, as well as UK and US English
Help documentation available substantially or entirely translated into German, Swedish and Japanese as well as English