5.2. Playing with ZynAddSubFX

Note

To know how to build ZynAddSubFX, see Section 3.8.

You can use ZynAddSubFX alone to understand what it is and how it works before using it with an audio sequencer like Rosegarden. We will only see here the basics of this powerful software. For more information, see its Homepage.

Note

If the internal samplerate of your Soundward is different than 44100 (it is to say 48000 for example), launch it like that: zynaddsubfx --sample-rate=48000.

Figure 5-3. ZynAddSubFX main window

Graphic interface is nice, but fonts are always a little bit to big for widgets. I do not know how to reduce them [1].

Anyway, once you are here you should see ZynAddSubFX line in the Readable Clients/output Ports part of the connexion manager screen.

Figure 5-4. Jack connection manager/ZynAddSubFX client

Do appropriate connections between ZynAddSubFX outputs and your soundcard inputs, as seen in screenshot Figure 5-4 [2].

Now go to the main ZynAddSubFX screen, open the Instrument->Virtual keyboard... menu.

Figure 5-5. ZynAddSubFX virtual keyboard

If you either click on the virtual synthetizer keys or press your computer keyboard keys you should hear some sound. You are hearing the default song of the ZynAddSubFX bank. To change instrument, open the Instrument->Show instrument bank menu. Then choose a bank and click on a patch. You should see the patch name displayed in the main window. But for now you are just working with 1 track.

To add other tracks and control their volume in an easy way, just click on the panel Window button in the main window. You will see a mixer like this:

Figure 5-6. ZynAddSubFX multitracks mixer

You can do a lot of things with ZynAddSubFX. Play with it a while.

Notes

[1]

Note from Ismael Cortes: "The only way I have found to get rid of that is to recompile FLTK (and maybe ZynAddSubFX, if it was compiled with FLTK statically) without the xft option configured (i.e. --disable-xft or just omitting --enable-xft, since it defaults to off). That seems to get the fonts were they should."

[2]

If you are lazy like me and do not want to manually connect it every time you launch it, just uncomment the 2 following lines in src/Output/JACKaudiooutput.C:


/*
  jack_connect(jackclient,jack_port_name(outport_left),"alsa_pcm:out_1");    
  jack_connect(jackclient,jack_port_name(outport_right),"alsa_pcm:out_2");
*/
      

and replace out_1 by playback_1 and out_2 by playback_2. Then rebuild ZynAddSybFX as explained in Section 3.8.