3.5. Hydrogen

Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine for GNU/Linux. It's main goal is to bring professional yet simple and intuitive pattern-based drum programming.

Download it here.

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ su -c "make install"
      

The output of the configuration step on my machine is:

-----------------------------------------------------------------
 Hydrogen 0.9.2 configuration:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

        Source code location:   .
        Prefix                  /usr
        Data path               /usr/share/hydrogen
        LDFLAGS                  -lsndfile   -lFLAC++ -lFLAC -ljack -lasound -llrdf -lraptor -lxml2

        Debug messages:         no
        FLAC:                   yes
        LRDF:                   yes

        Jack:                   yes
        ALSA :                  yes
        OSS:                    yes
        PortAudio               no
        PortMidi:               no

        Features list =  (FLAC) (Jack) (Alsa) (OSS) (LRDF)
      

If you have problems while using Hydrogen, if it starts to react very sluggish on mouse-clicks and updating of the graphics is also very slow, try to apply this patch. It come from the hydrogen-devel mailing-list (you can read the message here). Apply it like this:

$ cd /usr/src/hydrogen-0.9.2/src/gui/SongEditor/
$ patch SongEditor.cpp /usr/src/SongEditor.cpp-hydrogen-0.9.2.patch
      

For those who use the brand new SVN release, use scons instead of make:

$ scons prefix=/usr
$ su -c "scons prefix=/usr install"
      

And for those, like me, who bought the wonderfull NS Kit7 from Natural Studio, I have developed a Perl script that built a Hydrogen's drumkit XML file from scratch, parsing NS Kit7 audio files. You can download it here.