Linuxsampler

Linuxsampler is a software-based sampler on linux.

Standard Installation

   emerge -avt qsampler

This should emerge libgig, liblscp, linuxsampler, and qsampler (gui).

Pro-Audio Overlay Installation

LinuxSampler is in active development, to use the latest version you may opt to use the pro-audio overlay installation instead of the standard installation.

First, make sure you are using the pro-audio overlay (see Layman). Also, to use the cvs versions from the overlay you'll need to add these to your /etc/portage/package.keywords (replace x86 with your arch keyword)

  media-sound/qsampler ~x86 **
  media-sound/linuxsampler ~x86 **
  media-libs/libgig ~x86 **
  media-libs/liblscp ~x86 **

There is a little bug with the current linuxsampler ebuild. Use the following to go around it:

 emerge -1u libgig liblscp
 mkdir /var/lib/linuxsampler
 touch /var/lib/linuxsampler/instruments.db 
 emerge linuxsampler
 rm /var/lib/linuxsampler/instruments.db
 linuxsampler --create-instruments-db /var/lib/linuxsampler/instruments.db
 emerge qsampler

That should do it. Remember to update once in a while, for "emerge -uDN world" would not renew CVS/SVN ebuilds. You can perform an update by using the command:

 emerge -1 libgig liblscp linuxsampler qsampler

Running QSampler

You'll need to get your hand on some GIG sampler files. There are free GIG's and tools that convert other sampler formats e.g. Akai to GIG.

The QSampler GUI is organized such that you'll need to first specify where the MIDI events come from, and which audio device the sound is going to. You can use virtual midi keyboard (e.g. emerge vkeybd) to generate MIDI events if you don't have physical keyboard for the moment. Also, to find out where the MIDI events are generated from, use KMidi Monitor (e.g. emerge kmidimon).

Port conflict resolution

Linuxsampler uses port 8888 for talking with clients. If you happen to also run freenet and have port 8888 occupied, running qsampler would give you very strange results (because linuxsampler would fail to bind to 8888, and qsampler gui end up talking to freenet fproxy instead). To fix that, first shutdown freenet, then set linuxsampler to start on port 9888 and qsampler to communicate to server on port 9888, e.g. in qsampler server options, set the server command to this

 linuxsampler --lscp-port 9888

And then set port to 9888.

See Also

• LinuxSampler page
• Gentoo overlay howto
• Gentoo Pro-Audio Overlay