Review: Fervent Software Studio To Go!
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4

The Nomad

After I composed the tune at my studio, I traveled to my partner Don's studio to record a few percussion tracks. Don's studio is a bit different than mine, but no worries: I had saved my SoundFont bank and tune to my USB thumb drive so I could boot up my tune where I left it.

STG will automatically mount the USB drive when you open it; you can easily open it by double-clicking the icon on the desktop. The USB drive will often be auto-mounted to the location /mnt/sda1.

If it is not mounted, you will not be able to see its contents. For instance, if you traverse to the directory /mnt/sda1 within Rosegarden to load a tune and you have not mounted the USB drive, there will be no contents shown. In that case, it's easy just to go to the desktop and double-click on the USB icon to mount the USB drive.

We booted the STG CD on one of Don's PCs (containing an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 card) and connected the USB thumb drive containing the tune and SoundFont bank. The sound system, Rosegarden, and QSynth all booted fine. The only issue we had was with Rosegarden. When we called up the tune from the USB drive, it loaded fine into Rosegarden. Unfortunately, the instrument assignments were missing—they all defaulted to Patch 1. We had to reassign all of the instruments. The Rosegarden file should have saved those assignments, but it didn't for us.

Once we got past this hiccup, we were able to compose, mix, and deliver the file to the client. Back at my studio, Rosegarden behaved fine. Subsequent trips to other PCs produced no problems for instrument assignments, so this was likely an isolated event.

That Ol' JACK Magic

JACK (Jack Audio Connection Kit) is a utility that lets you route audio and MIDI data between applications and audio devices. To show its versatility, let's connect a playback meter to monitor the output level of QSynth.

1. Open the Connections panel in QjackCtl by pressing Connect on the front panel. You'll be presented with all recognized Jack devices and their current connections:

2. Pick a playback meter from the Meters menu. I'm partial to the digital peak meter because of its compact size:

3. Jack will automatically connect the meter's input to QSynth and Rosegarden and the output to your audio device. The meter is labeled "bridge-3448" in this example: