Re: MIDI devices

Hi Chris,

On 13/04/2026 01:03, chris wrote:
>
> I can't quite line up your description with the Rosegarden 
> documentation - it doesn't seem to use 'template' as a key word.
>
> Can you elaborate what you mean, like a doc page link, or a menu 
> command combination? I'd like to explore that suggestion.
>
If in Rosegarden you open the File menu you see e.g. "Open Template..." 
and "Save as template.." this will open/save as rgt file. On my system 
templates are by default in $HOME/.local/share/rosegarden/templates.

You could create a template which has e.g. devices named after your 
synts ('Korg Polysix'), then 4, 8, n numbers of tracks with the 
designated channel(s) for that synth (remember Rosegarden calls them 
'insrtruments'), save the template and every time you want a similar 
set-up load the template.

Actually, you can also have a regular rosegarden (.rg) file auto-load if 
you put it in $HOME/.local/share/rosegarden/autoload

If that's your everyday set-up you could put that kind of file in 
autoload and rosegarden will always start with it.

For example my defauly autoload has two devices, the 'General Midi' one 
for quick sketching and using e.g. FluidSynth and then a No Controllers 
device which I use for Yoshimi and has no panel controllers to be sure I 
set controllers only in Yoshimi.

It's pretty flexible I think.

>
> Quite a different approach came to my mind yesterday.
>
> Being a seasoned software developer, I downloaded the source. A quick 
> look at some *.cpp files looked more clear and promising than I 
> expected. And just this evening I managed to build Rosegarden 
> successfully from the source. So now I have a vision of a kludge hack:
>
> I could imagine decorating my device names with the required channel, 
> like "Korg Polysix:7". Then I could modify the source, so that on 
> assigning a device to a track I can make Rosegarden look up the device 
> name, extract the channel number (7), and set the track's channel 
> automatically. Everything I would need seems to be easily accessible 
> in the source - could even be something like a five liner.
>
> So I just set the track to a predefined synth in the UI, and bam - I 
> can play it from the track. That's what I would like. If it actually 
> works, this would be a big thumbs up for open source software...

That's also an option... Do consider that creating new tracks with a 
certain channel and device is very convenient if you do add Tracks 
(plural) you can add multiple tracks and select device and 'instrument' 
again this is actually midi channel).

Lorenzo