David Morris – brassedoff.net

Ok, so I’ve got Rosegarden working now and I can play back the music I’ve entered using a soft synthesizer (QSynth) and everything’s working just fine.

I’ve spent a few minutes knocking together a quick two-part arrangement of a Christmas Carol for Dan and myself to play for the Santa  Publicity Day in Retford (there’ll be more, but I have to start somewhere!).

Rosegarden will happily create a multi-line score, but it’s not Dan-friendly. Fortunately, Rosegarden will export Lilypond files. Lilypond is a GNU command-line application for music typesetting and will spit its output out in PDF or postscript format.

So, a few key presses later and this is the result:

O Little Town

Rosegarden should be able to preview and print direct using Lilypond, but for some reason, it isn’t. Not the end of the world because I just exported the file in Lilypond format and processed it on the command line:

david@server:~/Documents/Music> lilypond –pdf Little-Town-1.ly  Little-Town-2.ly

(I had two files to process – one for each part and could combine them on the same command line).

So, concept to hard copy music and not a commercial pay-for bit of software in the loop anywhere.

One of the bits of software I’ve never managed to get going on myLinux machine is the music editing and sequencing software, Rosegarden. I’ve been using Linux for years but never managed to crack  this goal… until today.

I was cruising the blogosphere earlier in the week looking for inspiration.  I’ve got some two part Christmas carol arrangements to do for Daniel and myself and I was faced with having to switch the Windows box on for the first time in a couple of months (yes, it’s been that long) and use Sibelius when I found the answer.

What I needed was a soft synthesizer and to pipe the midi output from Rosegarden in to that. It was all so blindingly obvious. I’d been barking up completely the wrong tree trying to get jack working properly.

Into Yast, install QSynth, follow a few simple instructions here and we were nearly off and cooking. the little green light on the QSynth tab was flashing to show that things were happening. The volume was turned up, but something was still missing…

Ah. Soundfonts.

Back to Yast, install the soundfont, a few program restarts and Rosegarden was alive, alive I tell you.

Yet another reason not to turn the Windows machine on at home. Can I think of any more?

If  there was a Linux or Mac port of Rail simulator now…

We’ve not had an awful lot of produce out of the garden this year, but we have had a good crop of chillis of various varieties.

They’ve been dried by hanging them in the kitchen then these have had a blast in the airing cupboard. Consequently, these rattle and there’s absolutely no moisture in them so they should keep for months.

One of our French users received an email regarding a tax issue with the UK tax authorities (HMRC). The URL started off ok, but turned out to be a little nasty:

(Please don’t click it)

http://online.hmrc.gov.uk.nyyyyase.com/SecurityWebApp/httpsmode/statement.php?{other id stuff redacted}

nyyyyase.com turns out to be a cluster of machines

dmlinux2:/home/david # host nyyyyase.com
nyyyyase.com has address 222.113.210.163
nyyyyase.com has address 61.73.96.212
nyyyyase.com has address 67.164.7.67
nyyyyase.com has address 79.175.103.228
nyyyyase.com has address 83.4.187.5
nyyyyase.com has address 89.134.5.8
nyyyyase.com has address 93.172.209.217
nyyyyase.com has address 110.13.183.155
nyyyyase.com has address 114.180.190.76
nyyyyase.com has address 121.174.9.100
nyyyyase.com has address 121.183.6.137
nyyyyase.com has address 190.139.220.38
nyyyyase.com has address 195.56.205.192
nyyyyase.com has address 210.116.200.91
nyyyyase.com has address 221.165.170.71

…and when you try to browse to the IP address, you’re redirected to microsoft.com, presumably in an attempt to cover tracks. The few that I’ve traced all seem to be Eastern Europe (Poland and Hungary)

Browse a little deeper though and you get a site not dissimilar to the HMRC web site in layout and colour.

Be warned!