…because I ordered Millenium MD70 digital drumset, which may be more a toy than a serious equipment. But if it works, it’s fine.
http://www.thomann.de/thoiw3_millenium_md70_digital_drumset_prodinfo.html
Check out my songs at http://www.emvg.net/esa
I just did a bit more searching around and it looks the module has sysex support. I’m not entirely sure what sysex is, so I need to do some reading. But I know it’s capable and I also believe you can upload new samples to the module.
Does this mean it’s possible to upload new samples to the module via linux?
SysEx: system exclusive MIDI messages. These are MIDI codes assigned to a device by a manufacturer to enable special functions. Almost every MIDI device supports it. SysEx could in this case enable support for editing/backup software, etc.
I’m still not convinced that the TD-12 will accept new audio samples, but it is probably able to allow a software editor to mangle/upload/download different COSM modeled kits. Essentially edits of the sounds that are already inside. On the Roland site there is a .pdf of the user manual. Read the MIDI implementation chart. See what you can glean from it.
A quick e-mail to Roland would provide the final answer to the sample upload question.
Finding editor software for linux, that’ll be the tricky part. But any sequencer should be able to receive/send SysEx for backup purposes.
Oh, it’s just that I saw a website, which specializes in samples for the v-drum series of kits. They have new sampled kits (specifically for the td-12) that you can buy from the website. I just can’t find the website again… I’ll email Roland now.
[edit]
I found the website I was talking about…
http://vexpressionsltd.com/
Tell me what you think…
[edit2]
Oh wow… found this on their site!
Q: Are your expansions samples? A: The Roland TD modules are not capable of loading or utilizing third party samples. Our expansions are the product of hours, days, weeks, months and even years of experienced programmer's modeling with Roland's COSM modeling technology.
So none of the TD modules allow you to use third party samples?! That’s a shock. =(
Just have been playing with before mentioned digital drumset through MIDI & LinuxSampler and free NSKit7, and what can I say? I am not a drummer, so I am more than happy with this combination. It is not like real drums but with this price, this is just great. With MD70, you can assign pads from the drumset so if midi mapping is not familiar this is the option.
And yes, you can use Hydrogen drum kits, .gig files in LinuxSampler, SoundFonts in Fluidsynth…everything. But playing with click is pain for me 
Check out my songs at http://www.emvg.net/esa
The Drumkit From Hell sounds great and works with Ubuntu and Jack, though it is somewhat unstable. Here are my notes if you’re interested:
Hello,
For realistic sounding drumming I use the free version of the NSKit7 with hydrogen. If you browse the hydrogen forum, you will find it together with a hydrogen file so it can be used like a normal hydrogen drumkit. I like it because each drum element has a broad velocity, unlike other hydrogen drumkit, which makes it sound very realistic. The drawback is that when you load this drumkit through hydrogen, you eat up a lot of memory (28% of my 4G ram according to top). If your system is low on RAM, forget it 
Yeah, I’m aware of the NSKit samples, but my original post was more about the possibility of hooking up a real electronic drumkit to my computer. Being a drummer, I’d much rather drum this way, than use a mouse or keyboard to create drum beats.
As it happens, since my OP, my circumstances changed and I moved abroad to work for a year and now I’ve returned, I need an electronic kit more than ever. I’m gonna have to save some pennies more than ever now.
Thanks for the replies by the way.
I used a set of VDrums triggering the nskit on a song that I did a few years ago…
If you are curious of the results, you can listen here: www.octechguy.com/mp3/SaveMeSCC.mp3
I wasn’t partial to the stock snare of NS, so that was changed to a different sample that I had, other than that, they are all ns samples.
mm0
Very cool… I’m downloading the track now. Was this done using linux? Which software did you use to trigger the samples successfully in linux? I know this is all very possible and easy to do on windows (from what I’ve read), so if you’ve pulled it off well with linux, then awesome!
I’m also back in the game for a v-drum kit (moneys for the win)!
this track was done with Cubase (Windows XP)…I used battery for the drum machine, triggered by the v-drums. However, I believe it would be possible in linux with no problems, as long as the vst’s that I’m thinking of work…I haven’t tried it, but KTDrumTrigger looks promising for this (http://www.audiocourses.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=339). a simple google search says that battery vst also works under wine, but I haven’t tried either of these (I made the switch to Linux about 6 months ago, and haven’t really done much recording other than podcasts since then).
I also have a licensed copy of virtual Guitarist which was used for the distorted guitar, but I don’t think it will work in Linux, becasue it requires a usb plug to make it work, and that requires drivers…that’s the one VSTi that I’m gonna miss!
mm0
Hey!
I started using Addictive Drums (made by XLN Audio) with dssi-vst. It is excellent!
Unfortunately, it is not really free … but the demo version is free and fully functional. It just does not have all the kit elements, only kick, snare, hihat, crash cymbal (no toms, no ride, no cowbell, etc). AD is totally controllable through MIDI, and the dssi host creates jack outputs for all elements, overhead track, room track and bus track. The editing capability inside AD is really nice, there are also tons of MIDI presets for all kinds of drum loops, you can import them in a MIDI sequencer (Muse, Rosegarden, etc, I use Rosegarden because you can ramp up/down the BPM easily) to edit them further, etc.
I use it as an external VSTi with dssi-vst, attach it to a rosegarden track and play the whole shebang along with ardour via jack transport. It has not crashed on me, it works flawlessly. I actually borrowed money to buy it and I don’t regret at all. It’s a bit of a “betrayal” to the open-source spirit of my studio but I really needed something pro. Hydrogen is a cool app but it is plagued by many limitations that I don’t have time to work on.
Anyway, I saw videos of ppl playing on their e-drums probably spitting out MIDI to the PC into AD. You can always have a look if you’re curious, at www.xlnaudio.com
They have a forum where I started posting my experience with the soft.
thorgal, I really do have to say thankyou!
I downloaded the demo of Addictive Drums. Ran wine on the installer, ran the dll inside vsthost and voila! It worked off the bat with my drums, though it wasn’t mapped all that well. My hi-hat wasn’t mapped to the hi-hat. I wonder if it’s possible to re-map AD to match my drum signals.
It sounds pretty good, though a bit weird with fast consecutive hits (like rolls on the snare). It definitely runs very, very nicely though. One thing I haven’t figured out yet, is how to route each instrument in AD to a seperate track in ardour (snare on one track, bass drum on another, etc) - but I’ve only played with it briefly. I’ve gotten a short midi recording down with Rosegarden and can play it back via AD.
Thanks thorgal… I need this information more than ever now. I have the drums sitting right next to my PC and I’m still not at a point where I can record via midi with them into the computer. Like you said, hyrdogen has its limitations and there’s also the issue of not having any good, realistic drum samples that are available linux software. Fortunately the rights to natural studio’s ns_kit7 has been purchased by another company and they started shipping the samples again (all wav files, unlocked, etc) - so it may be possible to create a new kit for hydrogen using these samples, if I buy them.
Toontrack’s Superior 2.0 sounds amazing - I would love for that to have linux support. Sigh - mac and windows users nearly have it all.
Yep, you can create new kits for Hydrogen with the Natural Drum Kit (former ns_kit7) but Hydrogen does not do disk streaming so unless you have a huge amount of memory, you will have to create limited kits. I happen to have the ns_kit free version. Just this one takes 25% of my memory (4G of RAM). You are thus warned 
I used to have a copy of the free version along with the definition file for Hydrogen, but I’ve lost it over time. You wouldn’t mind sending me a copy of the free samples would you? I’m considering buying the full samples, now that they’re available again - but I haven’t managed to figure out QSampler yet and I don’t know if there would be anything better to interface my drums with. It’s unfortunate that Hydrogen doesn’t stream from the disk like Qsampler can with gig files. I need to figure out MIDI in general. sigh…
I will give you a link to a tarball soon.
EDIT : split in 2 files, to be ‘tar jxf’ in your drumkits directory. Samples are at 96kHz, you may resample them if you need (I can provide a script to do so).
http://rapidshare.com/files/104850179/ns_kit7free_file1.tar.bz2.html
http://rapidshare.com/files/104852868/ns_kit7free_file2.tar.bz2.html
But you should really try the Addictive Drums demo and see if it can be run from your e-drum. I am almost convinced it will. I can try to help you in the process.
If you decide to try it, you will need wine (0.9.58 preferably), jack-dssi-vst and the dssi-vst plugin. It’s all available on the net if not from your distro repos. Once you have them installed, configure wine to emulate WinXP (type winecfg from a shell and the rest should be easy), select alsa and jack for audio (although I am not sure this is needed at all). Install the AD demo with a simple ‘wine Install Addictive Drums Demo.exe’. Then go to $HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/VSTPlugIns, copy Addictive Drums Demo.dll into your /usr/local/lib/vst or /home/yourself/vst, rename it so that the filename contains no space e.g. Addictive_Drums.dll and then, launch it from a shell : ‘vsthost Addictive_Drums.dll’ or 'jack-dssi-host dssi-vst.so:Addictive_Drums.dll
(Note: I changed the vsthost code to my taste because it by default appends the process ID in the jack client name. It is annoying when you restart an ardour session and the drum plugin has another name that makes ardour unhappy. So I removed the PID from the jack client name altogether to always have the same name for this client.)
Now, in qjackctl, you will see Addictive Drums as a jack client, all its audio outputs present (see manual for what they correspond to), and you will see it in the ALSA Midi tab so you can route any MIDI hardware to it. I have a digital piano which plays it very well but playing drums from a piano keyboard sucks a bit So I use it inside a sequencer like rosegarden (waiting for ardour to come up with MIDI and program my drum patterns very easily. I set all clients to be jack transport slaves et voila
It is really working great and is very stable. No xruns, no crash. The only annoying thing is rosegarden which sometimes screws up a bit. I could use other sequencers but I like the very useful and easy to use tempo ramping in it. I wish ardour could get inspired from it.
Thanks for the links - very much appreciated. I’m downloading now. Addictive drums does sound interesting, perhaps I’ll try this demo during the weekend.
You know what would rock? If virtualized hosts could interface with JACK. I’ve just (last night) installed WindowsXP on a virtual machine using VirtualBox (which also supports virtualization) and it’s running very fast and zippy. I needed it for web development testing, but seeing how quick it’s running, and knowing I can allocate as much memory to it as I want, it would be amazing if I could somehow make it recognise my RME soundcard and work with any one of the multitude of drum sampling software that’s out there, but output to JACK.
It outputs to alsa though. =]
no no, you can output to jack I wrote about it in the VST gui thread in the How do I forum. I actually did that one week ago You see, VirtualBox can output to pulseaudio. You simply need to configure pulseaudio so that it uses jack (sources and sink).
That’s the only way I get sound out of my wirtual winxp since I disabled everything but my RME HDSP in my PC. For the output it works really well! although you may need a biffy CPU and enough RAM. But for the input, well, you hear something but it is totally unsable. Using VirtualBox as an dynamic effect proc would be the ultimate worst choice I think :D:D
But if you have VSTi’s that can only run in windows and are just interested in outputting to the host (jack), there might be something here but you should not care about latency I would think
Ah, I see - well that’s a shame. It would have been nice to play my drums via the virtual machine install, outputting to JACK, but I do want low latency. Nevermind that then…
I notice you mention that you own an RME HDSP, which is the same card I have. Just a standard 9632 all on-board card. Do you use irc or have an email address that I can use to bug you with a few more specific questions? I’m on the #lad and #ardour irc channels on freenode.net, if you would prefer not to share your email address.
=]