Frequently Asked Questions for Rosegarden 10.02 and Later

Rosegarden is currently an application for Linux only. Since Rosegarden uses Qt 6, it shouldn't be too difficult to support multiple platforms. However, we are still very dependent on ALSA to provide MIDI infrastructure and JACK to provide an audio interface, and this will not be changing in the near future.

No. Rosegarden uses the Qt 6 libraries for various common controls, but you can run it under any window manager or graphical environment you like. So long as ALSA and JACK are available.

Minimal these days. See requirements for more details.

So long as your soundcard is supported by ALSA you are good. See the ALSA project's soundcard matrix.

English is fully supported. Depending on the availability of translators, other languages might also be available. Lately (2025) we've got translations for Polish, German, and French.

If you can help out with translating musical or technical documentation (no programming required, but it's quite hard work), please let us know!

Please take a look at the wiki page dedicated to adding or updating translation for complete details. That page tends to be more up to date than this section of the FAQ.

Actually it's just gzipped XML. You can use zless to look at an .rg file:

$ zless file.rg

gzip has a bit of trouble with gzipped files that don't end in .gz, so the easy way to have a look is to use

$ gunzip -c somefile.rg >somefile.xml

We've not had any reports on this in a very long time. Please post to the mailing list if you are having problems.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/rosegarden/lists/rosegarden-user

First, make sure you are running a version of rosegarden that was built with debugging turned on.

-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

Without debugging, there will be no symbols in the binary, and the backtrace will be useless. You'll likely need to build rosegarden on your own to get a debug version. Instructions can be found here: Building Rosegarden from Source

Open a terminal window, and check to ensure that applications will be able to produce core dumps. The exact command and syntax may vary from shell to shell, but for bash it is ulimit -a:

$ ulimit -a
core file size          (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size           (kbytes, -d) unlimited
scheduling priority             (-e) 20
...

The above example is quite typical for an end-user desktop system. Having the “core file size” set to 0 prevents the creation of very large core dump files in unexpected places, and is generally a good thing. However, this also prevents you from generating a stack trace. You need to change the limit to something larger than 0, but many systems prevent you from setting this to unlimited, so we suggest

$ ulimit -c 1000000

Now start a debug version of rosegarden from the command line, and reproduce the crash. You should now have a core file in your current directory. The core file is either named core or core.<number>.

Run gdb:

$ gdb rosegarden <core_file>

Then once you get the gdb prompt, use the command 'bt' to get the stack trace, and mail it to the authors or to the Rosegarden development mailing list, or include it in a bug report.

Please see the Building Rosegarden from Source page for detailed dependency and build information.

In order to be fully functional and provide the optimal user experience, Rosegarden requires the following external applications.

• bash
• available, functioning ALSA General MIDI soft synth (QSynth, TiMidity++, etc.) with soundfont (Fluid-Soundfont, Freepats, etc.)
• lilypond
• ocular OR acroread OR evince
• gtklp OR lpr OR lp
• jackd
• flac
• wavpack/wvunpack
• qjackctl
• DSSI plugins (any available)
• LADSPA plugins (any available)

While holding down Shift and the left mouse button, sweep out a loop region in the ruler at the top or bottom of the main composition window. The loop icon in the transport will become enabled and playback will always occur within this loop until you disable it. You can disable the loop by clicking on the loop icon or Shift+left clicking in either loop ruler.

Double-click on the track label.

On the main window go to Settings > View Track Labels.

Either click with the right mouse button, or click and hold with the left mouse button, on the track/instrument label. A pop-up will appear from which you can choose a new instrument for the track.

If the piece has more than one tempo change, then unfortunately it is not possible to listen at half or double speed. This feature has been requested since 2002, but does not exist yet. It is unlikely to be implemented.

Click the label field in the Segment Parameters box.

Hold down the Shift key while you move or resize the segment. (Shift is also used to enable multiple selection, so sometimes you may have to press Shift only after you start dragging.)

Select the segments either by click and drag or Shift+Click. Then press the N key.

There are various angles to this question, and there's not any one perfect answer.

For the best treatise on the subject, please see Piano Notation from MIDI.

Press Ctrl+A and then M.

It can be. We render the full length of each segment to a canvas when the notation editor starts, instead of rendering sections at a time when it scrolls. This means scrolling should be smooth and quick but the initial rendering phase relatively slow. This can be a problem for long segments, although for other practical reasons you're probably better off dividing long pieces into more manageable segments anyway.

Rosegarden likes to use the ALSA Linux sound drivers for MIDI communication, and the JACK low-latency audio server for audio. The build system should detect which of these you have available.

If you have (or build with) ALSA but not JACK, you will be able to send and receive MIDI to or from outboard MIDI hardware and other MIDI applications such as soft synths, but you will not be able to use synth plugins in Rosegarden, nor to record or play back audio segments or apply effects plugins.

You need a soft synth! See the next question.

This section is obsolete.

Well first, here's how to get fluidsynth working with a soundfont. First get fluidsynth. Then find a soundfont: one reasonable GM example is Musica Theoria 2, available as mustheory2.sf2 from the Collections area of Hammersound, although it's large and it's packed using some stupid Windows-only format (common problem – a few of the soundfonts on there are only zipped, though, so have a look around).

Then run up fluidsynth with

$ fluidsynth -m alsa_seq ./mustheory2.sf2

or equivalent for whichever soundfont you want to use. Alternatively get hold of qsynth which provides a nice GUI for fluidsynth.

If you're relatively short on CPU power, also give it “-R no” to turn off reverb and you'll get a bit more polyphony before it breaks up. (If you're very short on CPU power, forget it.) You may find you have to run it as root or else the pitch goes awry, particularly on laptops with variable-speed CPUs.

Anyway, when fluidsynth is running you should be able to assign tracks to it in Rosegarden. To set a track to one of the soft-synth instruments, right-click on the track label at the left of the track until the instrument menu appears and select the instrument on there. (If you have no other MIDI devices at all, then the soft-synth should be the default device.)

You can also use Timidity as an ALSA soft-synth with soundfonts. Run it in ALSA input mode:

$ timidity -iA

You can also use Timidity to play to JACK with reasonably low latency, with some magic incantation like:

$ timidity -iA -Oj -B2,8

In my experience it takes rather more CPU power than fluidsynth for rather lower-quality output, though I'm sure these things vary a lot depending on how the soundfont is made.

You can check which Instrument is selected for your Track by selecting the track and looking at the “Instrument Parameters” pane in the left column. You can change the Instrument for a Track by right-clicking or clicking and holding on the Track/Instrument label. A pop up menu will appear from which you can select a different Instrument.

Rosegarden automatically assigns the first available synth device on your soundcard for its default output Instrument when importing MIDI files.

If you're hearing silence with a Synth device (say “Emuk10k1 Port 0” or “OPL 3”) then make sure you've loaded a soundfont for your soundcard. To load soundfonts use the “sfxload” utility. For example the Creative SBLive! soundcard comes with a set of standard soundfonts (2gmgsmt.sf2, 4gmgsmt.sf2, 8mbgmsfx.sf2) and you can load the 8MB soundfont as follows:

$ sfxload 8mbgmsfx.sf2

For more fun with soundfonts including how to create them for yourself have a look at the Smurf/Swami project.

The other classic problem for new users of ALSA is that the mixer settings are either zero or muted. Run alsamixer and check that your levels are okay and unmuted. (Muting is displayed and changed separately from the levels themselves: you can be on 100% but still muted.)

If you see this message in an error dialog when Rosegarden starts up, then you are probably using a Linux kernel that doesn't offer sufficiently high-resolution system timers for MIDI use.

Rosegarden uses ALSA sequencer queue scheduling (inside the Linux kernel) for its MIDI output. The sequencer queue can use a variety of timing sources, of which the default is the kernel system timer. The kernel system timer was 1000 Hz in Linux 2.6 kernels up to 2.6.12, but as of 2.6.13 it's now 250 Hz in mainline kernels. This is not good enough for good MIDI timing.

Your options are:

1. Switch the sequencer to use a different timing source (Edit > Preferences… > MIDI > General > Sequencer timing source). This probably won't help.
2. Recompile your kernel with system timer set to 1000 Hz. Sadly there's no way to change this without a recompile. It's the best solution though.
3. Switch to a different Linux distribution that provides a kernel more appropriate for multimedia use.
4. Put up with the poorer timing of a 250 Hz timer (if you want to get rid of the warning while continuing to use this timer, set the timer source to “system timer” rather than “(auto)”).

If you don't want to recompile your kernel and are running (K)Ubuntu, you can choose a lowlatency kernel from the repository (search for it with synaptic or your favorite tool). Install the new kernel and reboot. This will solve the problem and remove the lag.

If Rosegarden plays notes at time zero but then gets stuck and doesn't play anything else afterwards, you might have a non-running sequencer timer selected.

Try going to Edit > Preferences… > MIDI > General and changing the “Sequencer timing source” setting.

If you're using ALSA, then you need to obtain and install JACK and run jackd before starting the Rosegarden sequencer. If you give jackd the -v option, it will report when Rosegarden succeeds in connecting to it.

Unfortunately getting the right combination of magic incantations to make JACK work is not always easy. Good values for an SBLive and indeed on the built-in via868 on my Acer laptop as follows:

$ jackd -d alsa -d hw -r 44100 -p 2048 -n 2

This will usually ensure that I don't get any xruns (JACK being unable to process audio in time) and provide reasonable latency. The '-r 44100' option sets the sample rate for the JACK server which will in turn define the rate at which WAV audio files will be recorded. This is important if you want to transfer any of the WAVs directly to CD - 44100 Hz (44.1 kHz) is the sample rate that audio CDs work at.

Rosegarden has an internal Studio to map your MIDI Program Change information into meaningful instrument labels. You need to set up this mapping in the MIDI device manager (Studio > Manage MIDI Devices > Banks…). Once you've made changes in your current Rosegarden file you can save it as a default studio (replacing your autoload.rg file) so that all your subsequent sessions in Rosegarden utilise your specialised Studio settings.

See the Rosegarden Device File (.rgd) Developer's Guide for more.

Try this site:

http://www.tedfelix.com/linux/linux-midi.html

The short answer to this is with care and with some luck. There are various recipes for improving JACK performance. Some are more labour intensive than others. Ask on the rosegarden-user and rosegarden-devel lists for the latest advice and also keep an eye on jackit-devel for more JACK tips.

to add somewhere appropriate: DSSI: no localhost

Go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts….

There is a setting for that:

Edit > Preferences > Notation → When recording MIDI, split-and-tie long notes at barlines