| I have been playing with the estimable Pianoteq physically modeled
piano synthesizer on Linux. This is commercial software well worth the
money. I have been using the Pianoteq for years (and just got a 1
minute piece realized with it into the 2010 ICMC 60x60 program
(rendered on Windows using the VST version of Pianoteq with Csound
and CsoundAC).
At any rate, I just now downloaded the native Linux version of
Pianoteq onto my Acer One (Atom-powered, Eeebuntu) netbook. This is a
pretty dinky machine. Pianoteq runs with dropouts using ALSA, and is
not usable at all with Jack, on this machine. One drawback is that
Jack MIDI is not supported, only Jack aliases for ALSA MIDI. Therefore
Jack's freewheeling mode is not usable with the Pianoteq, so the
Pianoteq is either limited to what you can do in real time, or must
read a MIDI file and render that to a soundfile on its own.
Nevertheless, Pianoteq ran immediately after downloading, required no
installation or configuration, looks pretty much identical to the
Windows version, and of course sounds great. I will see if I can get
my license to work on Linux. I am reasonably confident that on a more
powerful computer, i.e. an ordinary laptop, the Pianoteq would be
quite usable with Csound through Jack.
I will also put a request for Jack MIDI ports in to the Pianoteq
developers, that would make the Pianoteq usable with Jack and Csound
even on a weakling computer like my netbook with freewheeling.
There's an evaluation download of the native Linux Pianoteq online at
Modartt, so I'd be interested to hear of any reports of behavior on
more powerful Linux machines, especially with the new Jack opcodes.
Regards,
Mike
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