0 votesclick to vote up

Joel Leclerc: Creating an orchestral track under Ubuntu – Part 2: Setting up LMMS Published Aug 9 2013 via RSS

planetUbuntu

Part 1: Setting up JACK

Part 3: Setting up your orchestra

---

First, to address the question: “Why LMMS?” I’m actually not a huge fan of it, but, IMHO, it’s the best way to start producing music under linux if you’re kind of new to it (music producing under linux).

So… what’s so hard about setting up LMMS? Isn’t it just a matter of going to the Ubuntu Software Center, typing in “LMMS” and installing it? Yes and no. Yes, because that does, in fact, install LMMS. No, because it doesn’t add VST/VSTi support (which you’ll really want later on, trust me), AND, it doesn’t set it up either.

Now for the simple way:

sudo apt-get remove lmms
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:kxstudio-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine
sudo apt-get install lmms

That should work just fine (and should have VST support). But what if it doesn’t? This is where it gets a bit harder.

First, we’ll have to download LMMS: https://sourceforge.net/projects/lmms/files/lmms/ . Get the .tar.bz2 archive. The next step is rather obvious: Extract it! Right…… so after you’re done that, in a terminal, cd to where it’s extracted, and run this:

sudo apt-get remove lmms # Make sure that LMMS is not installed
sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev qt4-dev-tools build-essential cmake libsndfile1-dev libasound2-dev libjack-jackd2-dev libsdl-sound1.2-dev libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libfluidsynth-dev libfftw3-dev libstk0-dev stk wine wine-dev libwine-dev libwine libsamplerate0-dev libvorbis-dev libvorbisfile3 libvorbisenc2 # Install the required libraries to build this
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -USE=vst # Make sure we have VST support!!
make # You can add -jN to it, where N is the number of threads running concurrently, if you want to speed it up (assuming you have at least N cores)
sudo make install

There! It should work now!

Now we have to setup LMMS. Simply open up LMMS, and a configuration window should appear if this is the first time you opened it. If it is not, then go to Edit->Settings. Lets go to “Paths” (the folder icon). The defaults should mostly be okay, except for the “VST-Plugin Directory” one. Change that to the directory where your VSTs are (create one if you don’t have one yet. This is important!):

Then let’s go to “Audio settings” (the speaker icon). Change the audio interface to JACK, and make sure there are 2 channels:

Once you’re finished with that, let’s test! Click on the top track (it should look kind of like a light blue/cyan clover, without the stem, or like 3 circles) to open up the “Triple Oscillator” settings window, and click on one of the piano keys. If you don’t hear anything, make sure JACK is setup and running, the audio is at 100% and not muted, then restart LMMS.

---

Part 1: Setting up JACK

Part 3: Setting up your orchestra