doc/quickstart/live_editing.sgm

<chapter id="live_editing"><title>Live Editing</title>
 <section id="about"><title>Only trust what you hear...</title>
  <para>
        So far we've been using <application>gigedit</application> as stand-alone
        application. The main drawback of this approach is that you cannot
        immediately hear the effect of your modifications unless you explicitly
        (re)load the respective instrument into a sampler, which is unconvenient
        and wastes a lot of time (especially with big instruments). Fortunately
        gigedit and <application>LinuxSampler</application> are friends and
        politely share the same instrument(s) at the same time if you tell them to
        do so.
  </para>
  <para>
        To do this, you first have to load the respective instrument(s) into
        <application>LinuxSampler</application>, i.e. by using a frontend
        application like <application>JSampler</application> or
        <application>QSampler</application>. Here's how you do it with
        <application>QSampler</application>: Select the channel strip of the
        instrument you want to edit and click on the "Edit" button on the same
        channel strip, like shown in <xref linkend="shot_qsampler_edit" />.

        Alternatively you can also select this function from the menu (
        <menuchoice>
           <guimenu>"Edit"</guimenu>
           <guimenuitem>"Edit Channel..."</guimenuitem>
        </menuchoice> ). In any case
        <application>gigedit</application> should popup on the screen in less
        than 5 seconds. This time you can see <application>gigedit</application>
        like being "attached" to <application>LinuxSampler</application>.

  <figure id="shot_qsampler_edit"><title>Selecting an instrument to edit from QSampler</title>
        <screenshot><mediaobject><imageobject>
        <imagedata fileref="shot_qsampler_edit.png" format="PNG"/>
        </imageobject></mediaobject></screenshot>
  </figure>

        In <application>JSampler</application> you won't see an "Edit" button
        by default. Instead you have to move the mouse pointer over the channel
        strip which contains the instrument you want to edit. The channel strip
        display will change immediately and a round, small "Edit" button
        appears like shown in <xref linkend="shot_jsampler_edit" />. Click on
        that button and gigedit will appear like with
        <application>QSampler</application>, so it's pretty much the same thing.

  <figure id="shot_jsampler_edit"><title>Selecting an instrument to edit from JSampler "Fantasia" 0.8a</title>
        <screenshot><mediaobject><imageobject>
        <imagedata fileref="shot_jsampler_edit.png" format="PNG"/>
        </imageobject></mediaobject></screenshot>
  </figure>

  <figure id="shot_gigedit_hosted"><title>Gigedit running "attached" to LinuxSampler</title>
        <screenshot><mediaobject><imageobject>
        <imagedata fileref="shot_gigedit_hosted.png" format="PNG"/>
        </imageobject></mediaobject></screenshot>
  </figure>

        If nothing appears on the screen or in case you get an error when clicking
        on the "Edit" button, refer to <xref linkend="live_trouble" />.
  </para>
  <para>
        All modifications you do on the selected instrument with
        <application>gigedit</application> will immediately be audible when you
        play notes.
        When you close <application>gigedit</application> you'll notice that it
        won't ask you to save the instrument, which it would usually do when you
        run <application>gigedit</application> as stand-alone application. This is
        because the modifications are not lost when you close it, at least not
        unless you kill the sampler as well. So when you click again on "Edit"
        you'll see that all the modifications you made are still there. Also note
        when selecting "New" or "Open" from the menu to create a completely new
        instrument or open another one from a file,
        <application>gigedit</application> will be "detached" from the sampler,
        that is the other instrument will not be audible with the sampler. This is
        currently (2007-10-07) a minor limitation of the sampler and
        <application>gigedit</application>. So if you want to create a completely
        new instrument from scratch you first have to create that instrument with
        <application>gigedit</application>, save it to a file and then load it into
        the sampler. After that you can continue like described in this chapter and
        edit the new instrument "live" by clicking on the respective "Edit" button
        in <application>QSampler</application>.
  </para>
 </section>

 <section id="live_trouble"><title>Trouble with live-editing</title>
  <para>
        <application>LinuxSampler</application> and
        <application>gigedit</application> need to be compiled properly to be able
        to use the described "live editing" feature between those two applications.
        So here is a short technical explanation how the interaction between those
        two applications work: <application>LinuxSampler</application> per se
        doesn't actually know anything that an application like
        <application>gigedit</application> exists in this world. However the
        sampler provides a plugin system to extend it for this functionality. When
        you compile the sampler you define a directory where the sampler shall look
        for plugin DLLs to load on startup. So first check if that directory
        actually exists or if the sampler was not compiled with the correct /
        desired plugin directory. When you start the sampler from the console
        simply by typing the command <command>linuxsampler</command> and you see
        something like this:
        <screen>
<prompt>bob@mybox ~ $</prompt> <command>linuxsampler</command>
LinuxSampler 0.4.0.7cvs
Copyright (C) 2003,2004 by Benno Senoner and Christian Schoenebeck
Copyright (C) 2005-2007 Christian Schoenebeck
Detected features: MMX SSE
Creating Sampler...OK
Registered sampler engines: 'GIG'
Registered MIDI input drivers: ALSA
Registered audio output drivers: ALSA,ARTS,JACK
Loading instrument editor plugins...<errortext>Could not open instrument editor plugins directory (/usr/local/lib/linuxsampler/plugins): No such file or directory</errortext>
Registered instrument editors:
Starting LSCP network server (0.0.0.0:8888)...OK
LinuxSampler initialization completed. :-)
        </screen>
        Then there's definitely something wrong. :) So either create the mentioned
        directory (in this case "/usr/local/lib/linuxsampler/plugins") manually or
        recompile <application>LinuxSampler</application> in case you want it to use
        another directory as plugins directory. Assuming you want it to use the directory "/usr/lib/linuxsampler/plugins" instead you could compile the sampler i.e. this way:
        <screen>
<prompt>bob@mybox ~/cvs/linuxsampler $</prompt> <command>./configure --enable-plugin-dir=/usr/lib/linuxsampler/plugins &amp;&amp; make</command>
        </screen>
        probably in conjunction with some other configure script parameters and some
        nice CXXFLAGS to optimize the sampler for your machine, but this is out of
        the scope of this document. After the compilation completed, you would
        install the sampler as user root as usual:
        <screen>
<prompt>bob@mybox ~/cvs/linuxsampler $</prompt> <command>su</command>
Password:
<prompt>mybox linuxsampler #</prompt> <command>make install</command>
        </screen>
        Again make sure that your chosen plugin directory exists, if not create it
        and when running <application>LinuxSampler</application> now again, the
        error message on the console ("Could not open instrument editor plugins
        directory") should be gone.
  </para>
  <para>
        Now you must recompile <application>gigedit</application>, because it has
        to compile the appropriate plugin and has to place that plugin DLL into the
        samplers plugins directory. It should look like this:
        <screen>
<prompt>bob@mybox ~/cvs/gigedit $</prompt> <command>./configure</command>
checking build system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking host system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
...
checking for gmsgfmt... /usr/bin/gmsgfmt
checking for xgettext... /usr/bin/xgettext
checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config
checking pkg-config is at least version 0.9.0... yes
checking for GTKMM... yes
checking for GIG... yes
checking for SNDFILE... yes
checking for SF_INSTRUMENT.loops... yes
<errortext>checking for LINUXSAMPLER... yes
Found linuxsampler 0.4.0.5cvs
Retrieving LinuxSampler's plugin dir... /usr/lib/linuxsampler/plugins
Relative plugin dir: ${libdir}/linuxsampler/plugins</errortext>
configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating Makefile
config.status: creating src/Makefile
config.status: creating src/gigedit/Makefile
config.status: creating src/plugin/Makefile
config.status: creating po/Makefile.in
config.status: creating debian/Makefile
config.status: creating doc/Makefile
config.status: creating doc/quickstart/Makefile
config.status: creating config.h
config.status: config.h is unchanged
config.status: executing depfiles commands
config.status: executing intltool commands
config.status: executing default-1 commands
config.status: executing po/stamp-it commands
<prompt>bob@mybox ~/cvs/gigedit $</prompt> <command>make</command>
        </screen>
        Make sure the higlighted section of the configure script output looks
        similar like above. After compilation completed, you once again install
        with the common procedure:
        <screen>
<prompt>bob@mybox ~/cvs/gigedit $</prompt> <command>su</command>
Password:
<prompt>mybox gigedit #</prompt> <command>make install</command>
        </screen>
        This will install the <application>gigedit</application> binary, as well
        as its plugin .so file into the directory "/usr/lib/linuxsampler/plugins"
        (or whatever you chose). And when you start the sampler now from the
        console, it should look like this:
        <screen>
<prompt>bob@mybox ~ $</prompt> <command>linuxsampler</command>
LinuxSampler 0.4.0.7cvs
Copyright (C) 2003,2004 by Benno Senoner and Christian Schoenebeck
Copyright (C) 2005-2007 Christian Schoenebeck
Detected features: MMX SSE
Creating Sampler...OK
Registered sampler engines: 'GIG'
Registered MIDI input drivers: ALSA
Registered audio output drivers: ALSA,ARTS,JACK
Loading instrument editor plugins...OK
<errortext>Registered instrument editors: 'gigedit'</errortext>
Starting LSCP network server (0.0.0.0:8888)...OK
LinuxSampler initialization completed. :-)
        </screen>
        Now you're done with setup and the steps described in
        <xref linkend="about" /> should work for you. If not, you probably found a
        bug. Feel free to contact us via our mailing list or open a bug report on
        our website.
        <note>If you just used precompiled binary packages of
        <application>LinuxSampler</application> and
        <application>gigedit</application>, i.e. from the Linux distribution of
        your choice, you shouldn't have to recompile them by yourself. Either the
        versions of <application>LinuxSampler</application> and / or
        <application>gigedit</application> are too old or they were simply not
        compiled / packaged correctly. In both cases, please report it to the
        respective package maintainer of your distribution!</note>
  </para>
 </section>
</chapter>
1	<chapter id="live_editing"><title>Live Editing</title>
2	<section id="about"><title>Only trust what you hear...</title>
3	<para>
4	So far we've been using <application>gigedit</application> as stand-alone
5	application. The main drawback of this approach is that you cannot
6	immediately hear the effect of your modifications unless you explicitly
7	(re)load the respective instrument into a sampler, which is unconvenient
8	and wastes a lot of time (especially with big instruments). Fortunately
9	gigedit and <application>LinuxSampler</application> are friends and
10	politely share the same instrument(s) at the same time if you tell them to
11	do so.
12	</para>
13	<para>
14	To do this, you first have to load the respective instrument(s) into
15	<application>LinuxSampler</application>, i.e. by using a frontend
16	application like <application>JSampler</application> or
17	<application>QSampler</application>. Here's how you do it with
18	<application>QSampler</application>: Select the channel strip of the
19	instrument you want to edit and click on the "Edit" button on the same
20	channel strip, like shown in <xref linkend="shot_qsampler_edit" />.
21
22	Alternatively you can also select this function from the menu (
23	<menuchoice>
24	<guimenu>"Edit"</guimenu>
25	<guimenuitem>"Edit Channel..."</guimenuitem>
26	</menuchoice> ). In any case
27	<application>gigedit</application> should popup on the screen in less
28	than 5 seconds. This time you can see <application>gigedit</application>
29	like being "attached" to <application>LinuxSampler</application>.
30
31	<figure id="shot_qsampler_edit"><title>Selecting an instrument to edit from QSampler</title>
32	<screenshot><mediaobject><imageobject>
33	<imagedata fileref="shot_qsampler_edit.png" format="PNG"/>
34	</imageobject></mediaobject></screenshot>
35	</figure>
36
37	In <application>JSampler</application> you won't see an "Edit" button
38	by default. Instead you have to move the mouse pointer over the channel
39	strip which contains the instrument you want to edit. The channel strip
40	display will change immediately and a round, small "Edit" button
41	appears like shown in <xref linkend="shot_jsampler_edit" />. Click on
42	that button and gigedit will appear like with
43	<application>QSampler</application>, so it's pretty much the same thing.
44
45	<figure id="shot_jsampler_edit"><title>Selecting an instrument to edit from JSampler "Fantasia" 0.8a</title>
46	<screenshot><mediaobject><imageobject>
47	<imagedata fileref="shot_jsampler_edit.png" format="PNG"/>
48	</imageobject></mediaobject></screenshot>
49	</figure>
50
51	<figure id="shot_gigedit_hosted"><title>Gigedit running "attached" to LinuxSampler</title>
52	<screenshot><mediaobject><imageobject>
53	<imagedata fileref="shot_gigedit_hosted.png" format="PNG"/>
54	</imageobject></mediaobject></screenshot>
55	</figure>
56
57	If nothing appears on the screen or in case you get an error when clicking
58	on the "Edit" button, refer to <xref linkend="live_trouble" />.
59	</para>
60	<para>
61	All modifications you do on the selected instrument with
62	<application>gigedit</application> will immediately be audible when you
63	play notes.
64	When you close <application>gigedit</application> you'll notice that it
65	won't ask you to save the instrument, which it would usually do when you
66	run <application>gigedit</application> as stand-alone application. This is
67	because the modifications are not lost when you close it, at least not
68	unless you kill the sampler as well. So when you click again on "Edit"
69	you'll see that all the modifications you made are still there. Also note
70	when selecting "New" or "Open" from the menu to create a completely new
71	instrument or open another one from a file,
72	<application>gigedit</application> will be "detached" from the sampler,
73	that is the other instrument will not be audible with the sampler. This is
74	currently (2007-10-07) a minor limitation of the sampler and
75	<application>gigedit</application>. So if you want to create a completely
76	new instrument from scratch you first have to create that instrument with
77	<application>gigedit</application>, save it to a file and then load it into
78	the sampler. After that you can continue like described in this chapter and
79	edit the new instrument "live" by clicking on the respective "Edit" button
80	in <application>QSampler</application>.
81	</para>
82	</section>
83
84	<section id="live_trouble"><title>Trouble with live-editing</title>
85	<para>
86	<application>LinuxSampler</application> and
87	<application>gigedit</application> need to be compiled properly to be able
88	to use the described "live editing" feature between those two applications.
89	So here is a short technical explanation how the interaction between those
90	two applications work: <application>LinuxSampler</application> per se
91	doesn't actually know anything that an application like
92	<application>gigedit</application> exists in this world. However the
93	sampler provides a plugin system to extend it for this functionality. When
94	you compile the sampler you define a directory where the sampler shall look
95	for plugin DLLs to load on startup. So first check if that directory
96	actually exists or if the sampler was not compiled with the correct /
97	desired plugin directory. When you start the sampler from the console
98	simply by typing the command <command>linuxsampler</command> and you see
99	something like this:
100	<screen>
101	<prompt>bob@mybox ~ $</prompt> <command>linuxsampler</command>
102	LinuxSampler 0.4.0.7cvs
103	Copyright (C) 2003,2004 by Benno Senoner and Christian Schoenebeck
104	Copyright (C) 2005-2007 Christian Schoenebeck
105	Detected features: MMX SSE
106	Creating Sampler...OK
107	Registered sampler engines: 'GIG'
108	Registered MIDI input drivers: ALSA
109	Registered audio output drivers: ALSA,ARTS,JACK
110	Loading instrument editor plugins...<errortext>Could not open instrument editor plugins directory (/usr/local/lib/linuxsampler/plugins): No such file or directory</errortext>
111	Registered instrument editors:
112	Starting LSCP network server (0.0.0.0:8888)...OK
113	LinuxSampler initialization completed. :-)
114	</screen>
115	Then there's definitely something wrong. :) So either create the mentioned
116	directory (in this case "/usr/local/lib/linuxsampler/plugins") manually or
117	recompile <application>LinuxSampler</application> in case you want it to use
118	another directory as plugins directory. Assuming you want it to use the directory "/usr/lib/linuxsampler/plugins" instead you could compile the sampler i.e. this way:
119	<screen>
120	<prompt>bob@mybox ~/cvs/linuxsampler $</prompt> <command>./configure --enable-plugin-dir=/usr/lib/linuxsampler/plugins && make</command>
121	</screen>
122	probably in conjunction with some other configure script parameters and some
123	nice CXXFLAGS to optimize the sampler for your machine, but this is out of
124	the scope of this document. After the compilation completed, you would
125	install the sampler as user root as usual:
126	<screen>
127	<prompt>bob@mybox ~/cvs/linuxsampler $</prompt> <command>su</command>
128	Password:
129	<prompt>mybox linuxsampler #</prompt> <command>make install</command>
130	</screen>
131	Again make sure that your chosen plugin directory exists, if not create it
132	and when running <application>LinuxSampler</application> now again, the
133	error message on the console ("Could not open instrument editor plugins
134	directory") should be gone.
135	</para>
136	<para>
137	Now you must recompile <application>gigedit</application>, because it has
138	to compile the appropriate plugin and has to place that plugin DLL into the
139	samplers plugins directory. It should look like this:
140	<screen>
141	<prompt>bob@mybox ~/cvs/gigedit $</prompt> <command>./configure</command>
142	checking build system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
143	checking host system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
144	checking for gcc... gcc
145	checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
146	checking whether the C compiler works... yes
147	checking whether we are cross compiling... no
148	...
149	checking for gmsgfmt... /usr/bin/gmsgfmt
150	checking for xgettext... /usr/bin/xgettext
151	checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config
152	checking pkg-config is at least version 0.9.0... yes
153	checking for GTKMM... yes
154	checking for GIG... yes
155	checking for SNDFILE... yes
156	checking for SF_INSTRUMENT.loops... yes
157	<errortext>checking for LINUXSAMPLER... yes
158	Found linuxsampler 0.4.0.5cvs
159	Retrieving LinuxSampler's plugin dir... /usr/lib/linuxsampler/plugins
160	Relative plugin dir: ${libdir}/linuxsampler/plugins</errortext>
161	configure: creating ./config.status
162	config.status: creating Makefile
163	config.status: creating src/Makefile
164	config.status: creating src/gigedit/Makefile
165	config.status: creating src/plugin/Makefile
166	config.status: creating po/Makefile.in
167	config.status: creating debian/Makefile
168	config.status: creating doc/Makefile
169	config.status: creating doc/quickstart/Makefile
170	config.status: creating config.h
171	config.status: config.h is unchanged
172	config.status: executing depfiles commands
173	config.status: executing intltool commands
174	config.status: executing default-1 commands
175	config.status: executing po/stamp-it commands
176	<prompt>bob@mybox ~/cvs/gigedit $</prompt> <command>make</command>
177	</screen>
178	Make sure the higlighted section of the configure script output looks
179	similar like above. After compilation completed, you once again install
180	with the common procedure:
181	<screen>
182	<prompt>bob@mybox ~/cvs/gigedit $</prompt> <command>su</command>
183	Password:
184	<prompt>mybox gigedit #</prompt> <command>make install</command>
185	</screen>
186	This will install the <application>gigedit</application> binary, as well
187	as its plugin .so file into the directory "/usr/lib/linuxsampler/plugins"
188	(or whatever you chose). And when you start the sampler now from the
189	console, it should look like this:
190	<screen>
191	<prompt>bob@mybox ~ $</prompt> <command>linuxsampler</command>
192	LinuxSampler 0.4.0.7cvs
193	Copyright (C) 2003,2004 by Benno Senoner and Christian Schoenebeck
194	Copyright (C) 2005-2007 Christian Schoenebeck
195	Detected features: MMX SSE
196	Creating Sampler...OK
197	Registered sampler engines: 'GIG'
198	Registered MIDI input drivers: ALSA
199	Registered audio output drivers: ALSA,ARTS,JACK
200	Loading instrument editor plugins...OK
201	<errortext>Registered instrument editors: 'gigedit'</errortext>
202	Starting LSCP network server (0.0.0.0:8888)...OK
203	LinuxSampler initialization completed. :-)
204	</screen>
205	Now you're done with setup and the steps described in
206	<xref linkend="about" /> should work for you. If not, you probably found a
207	bug. Feel free to contact us via our mailing list or open a bug report on
208	our website.
209	<note>If you just used precompiled binary packages of
210	<application>LinuxSampler</application> and
211	<application>gigedit</application>, i.e. from the Linux distribution of
212	your choice, you shouldn't have to recompile them by yourself. Either the
213	versions of <application>LinuxSampler</application> and / or
214	<application>gigedit</application> are too old or they were simply not
215	compiled / packaged correctly. In both cases, please report it to the
216	respective package maintainer of your distribution!</note>
217	</para>
218	</section>
219	</chapter>