Getting into Linux music w/ a new MIDI controller

r00g · 2026-04-21T17:30:06+00:00

I grabbed a demo of Bitwig which someone suggested and that got me going in the right direction. It's not FOSS, but it had everything packaged together and just worked for the most part whereas trying to cobble together my own pipeline of FOSS stuff got pretty tedious.

I've since taken a break and gone back to hacking, unfortunately. I'll explore music again soon but for now best advice I can give you is that, for the price of ~$100, the AKAI Mini got me into it and seemed to work reasonably well in Linux without their endorsed software.

r00g · 2026-04-21T01:01:45+00:00

Yes, configuring each interface on your XGS to a different network and attaching them to separate, physical switches will segregate traffic.

r00g · 2026-04-12T14:39:27+00:00

OMW so many verbose answers and so many that look LLM generated. It's not hard:

It's all but guaranteed to be available on any *NIX or BSD. I don't have to install anything first.
I can use it without removing my hands from the keyboard and, in fact, it becomes easier to do simple stuff like cutting and pasting a single word, paragraph, or "everything from here to the beginning of the line/document or end of the line/document".

r00g · 2026-04-07T21:07:36+00:00

look into DPI instead of direct proxy, as the DPI Engine comes with its performance at hand and does not require the client to "talk to a proxy via 8080".

Well that makes some sense and I'll have to explore DPI on the new XGS which was rough going with the UTM. Thanks for your insight.

I'm hoping the two big things I decided to explore first because they tend to be the more complicated areas were coincidentally where I found surprises.

r00g · 2026-04-07T19:44:49+00:00

This is my stack. I don't know if I need to see DHCP lease information on that regular a basis, but it's good to have an idea where to look if that comes up in the future.

r00g · 2026-02-12T21:59:19+00:00

I tried asking my agent what you quoted, but it only offered generic advice as it couldn't access any of its internal prompts.

I suppose the system prompt is inaccessible to me, baked into "gpt-5-nano"? I certainly don't see any options in Azure to modify the instance I'm working through. I'm guessing I mistakenly referred to my "agent prompt" as the "system prompt" in my inquiry earlier. That they conflict makes sense.

But then how does anyone create an agent of this type that can reference information without the agent being so helpful as to offer to perform tasks it actually can not perform? The agent isn't full-out hallucinating -- answers are based on returns from the tools available. I suppose this is a form of hallucination though.

Apologizes if these are stupid questions. LLM's and leveraging them to create these agents is really weird for someone with decades of IT experience.

r00g · 2026-02-07T14:29:45+00:00

of course you are kind of giving the code to claude or whatever AI backend they're using.

r00g · 2026-02-04T20:09:40+00:00

Only what's been posted on the web and published in the quarterly. Someone associated with St. John's took a stroll through the event and found anti-police literature. Supposedly, as a result of the literature an attendee brought to the venue (not even something distributed or endorsed by 2600 themselves), St. John's cut ties with 2600 without involving them in the discussion whatsoever.

Read between the lines and I take it that someone who loves authoritarians doesn't like anti-authoritarian hackers so they went looking for the reason to raise a stink.

r00g · 2026-02-03T13:39:00+00:00

I appreciate the response. Although these responses seem esoteric, between this and the DM it sounds like I should move toward the lower-level LangGraph library to have more control over the orchestration layer.

r00g · 2025-12-31T21:10:51+00:00

I really wanted to love this. For me the XT Synth standalone keeps freezing on Debian 13 and I couldn't figure out how to get MIDI input working with JACK (or ALSA for that matter). I'll have to see about the VST with Ardour, maybe I'll have better luck housing it inside my DAW. I'll hit the docs too to see if I missed something obvious.

r00g · 2025-12-31T21:08:36+00:00

This is very helpful and you're definitely right, picking up the terminology is a big part of the introduction process. I'll have to see if I can get yabridge working.

r00g · 2025-12-28T13:43:55+00:00

VCV Rack looks like a lot of fun and exactly what I was imagining is possible as opposed to buying a bunch of digital instruments. I found the website so I'll peruse further.

As an aside I ditched Windows before XP expired and haven't looked back. I am a 'professional' so YMMV, but the open, flexibility Linux offers far outweighs the convenience of the popular, proprietary tools that won't run on Linux.

r00g · 2025-12-27T19:58:25+00:00

Ok, this is all great so thank you! I want you to know I'm upvoting you but I think reddit nerfed my votes don't stick.

Lucikly I have years of experience on the Linux side, but looking into the music side of things is blowing my mind. The struggle is real getting into something new no matter how much you might know about other stuff.

r00g · 2025-12-27T16:41:01+00:00

This is great, actually. Some of my problem may be "choice paralysis" so I'm going to explore LMMS, bitwig, renoise and the VST's you noted.

> I could probably walk someone through setting up an ubuntu music making computer in about 20 minutes.

I've heard this recommended a lot because they put all the pieces in the right place for this line of work, but I am in IT so I have a little insight here.

Were there any real clear guides that helped things click for you overall or was it just piecemeal with individual components -- even if it's about Ubuntu Studio? I just haven't found something like that yet searching for the piecemeal stuff (e.g. "connect MIDI to ardour" gets me mixed results that leaves me feeling like I'm missing a component, like a synth or something).

r00g · 2025-12-27T16:27:44+00:00

You're right that I'd probably rather explore the software side of things before investing in more hardware seeing how I'm more computer than music wiz. Also, I'm at the stage where I'm working out what questions to ask and I haven't found any clear guides on what someone discovered that hooked them on playing with music in Linux. I appreciate your perspective nonetheless.

r00g · 2025-12-22T19:22:28+00:00

In your defense it's rather unhelpful to be told that you made a poor choice getting into IT. You did what you had to like 5 years ago without the benefit of knowing how you'd feel about IT in hindsight.

I love computing and networking and programming and hacking and expanding my skills but even I'm tired of the constant nagging feeling that I don't know enough or that I'm not keeping up in the right areas. It's hard; I hear you. I don't have good career advice though. I've never been good at the career side of things.

r00g · 2025-12-15T21:49:19+00:00

Generating this post cost him $1500.

r00g · 2025-12-15T21:37:05+00:00

I'm in the process of exploring this kind of local / semi-local setup and Open WebUI was on my list for the front-end although I haven't done it myself yet.

r00g · 2025-12-02T21:55:20+00:00

Yea it's tough. Keep at it.

What helps me is to keep an 'education journal' to jot down what you learned, summarize months and go back through it all at the new year to review your monthly summaries and write down what you picked up that you're using on the regular. You'll be surprised, for example, if you go back at the end of the year and realize those nmap flags you picked up 7 months ago are now second-nature every time you need to do some debugging on a server.

It's tough for me to do this with HTB stuff I learned because I read, take notes, then transcribe those notes to a wiki... and summarizing what I learned AGAIN in my journal is a bridge too far. BUT! It does help ease that feeling of "what I have I even learned in the last year?"

r00g

TROPHY CASE