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Comment by fdej | Hacker News Reader

Ah, too bad that the sequencer mode is being delayed.

For about 20 years now, I'm still holding my breath for a MIDI sequencer that runs on Linux and has all the functionality and user-friendliness of Cakewalk 3 (http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/images/6/63/Player_-_Cakewalk_Prof...).

Sekaiju (https://openmidiproject.osdn.jp/index_en.html) is open source and is 95% there in terms of the user interface, but alas it's Windows only and I'm not aware of any effort to make a Linux port. (Don't suggest Wine, because trying to get MIDI to work with that is a nightmare. A nice thing about the current MuseScore is that MIDI playback works out of the box.)

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I do suggest Wine, actually. I've just ran Sekaiju with it and it happily played a random MIDI file I selected after changing the output port in settings to TiMidity++ (the first dropdown list in Setup->MIDI device and instrument->Midi out device). It probably also isn't just me, the latest appdb rating of Sekaiju is platinum on wine 4.0 - for the record, I'm using 5.20 staging.

Fair warning: While that program itself is open source, it's hard to patch/contribute to these type of projects if you aren't developing on Windows. Like a lot of Win32 applications it has MFC as a build requirement, which is still proprietary and not straightforward to use outside windows: https://wiki.winehq.org/Winelib_User%27s_Guide#Dealing_with_...

(I speak from frustration after trying to build MFC apps on Linux to varying degrees of success)

Have you tried Reaper? I haven’t personally used the experimental Linux builds, because I depend on a lot of third party VSTs, but if it's anywhere near as good as it is on Windows/Mac it may work for you.

I haven't come across any missing functions so far, should be on par with MacOS/Windows on that. Only the Interface looks a bit old-style and seems to be the only issue right now. All the "expermiental" builds have been very stable for me on Ubuntu Studio :)

Reaper was completely solid on Linux the last time I used it. The only instability came with trying to use a wrapper to use Windows VSTs, but everything struggles with VSTs, wrapped or not.

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