Rosegarden

What is Rosegarden-2.1?

Rosegarden-2.1 is an integrated MIDI sequencer and musical notation editor. It is free software for Unix and X, running on systems such as Linux, FreeBSD and SGI IRIX, and now also on OpenVMS. Take a look at some pictures of it in use.

Rosegarden-2.1 is an old program that has not been significantly improved for over four years, apart from a few bug fixes and some very minor features. All the new stuff is happening in the Rosegarden-4 project, which although still in heavy development is already a vastly more useful program for most users.

However, Rosegarden-2.1 has the big advantage that it runs fine on old machines, and it can be very useful for people whose machines can't run KDE, are too old for ALSA, or run versions of Unix other than Linux. It will run happily on a 486 with no more than 16MB of memory, and although the sequencer looks very limited next to newer software, the notation editor really isn't bad.

Get the latest release

The current version, which you can download here, is 2.1 patchlevel 4, released in April 2002. Not very much has changed since version 2.1, which was released in October 1997; the 2.1 series is no longer in active development, and it's likely that there will continue only to be occasional patch releases.

For a list of features, including a list of changes for 2.1 and previous releases, see the features page.

What does it run on?

To run Rosegarden-2.1, you will need a computer that runs Unix or OpenVMS with the X window system. If you have an Intel PC with Linux, or a Silicon Graphics IRIX machine, you can use one of the binary distributions; otherwise you'll have to compile it from the source distribution. (This may be the best idea anyway, even if you do have Linux or IRIX.) To compile it, you need a C compiler and the X libraries.

Of course, if you want to make some noise then you'll need a version of Unix with a sound driver that Rosegarden can use. The standard Open Sound System Lite drivers for Linux or FreeBSD should be okay; the Silicon Graphics MIDI drivers built in to IRIX 5.2 onwards should also work. For other platforms, you may be able to use commercial Open Sound System drivers.

Also, just because Rosegarden understands your sound driver doesn't mean it understands your soundcard; external MIDI synthesisers are more likely to work than internal soundcard ones.

Where do I get it?

You can download source and binary distributions from this very site.

Contacts and Credits

Rosegarden 2.1 was written by Chris Cannam, Andy Green, Richard Bown and Guillaume Laurent. Thanks to John ffitch for Yodaesque inspiration ("Use the source, Luke!")

If you have further questions or things to discuss, why not join the mailing list?

If you're interesting in contributing development time, why not contribute to the Rosegarden-4 project instead?