I took the opportunity of being alone in the house to set up for some recording in our living room. It's a much bigger space than the study, so I was hoping the acoustics would be good. The Zoom H4 was on a tripod in front of me on the sofa with my acoustic. It took a few attempts with me messing it up to get this version of an old song.

I also had a go at some more high-tech recording. For my next Six String Bliss album track I am starting with a MIDI version I found and will replace as many tracks as I can manage. I'm going to try using Rosegarden for both MIDI and audio this time, if it can do what I need. I didn't get far today as I was having trouble getting all the MIDI tracks to play. This may be down to the messing around I did to get the USB MIDI gadget working, but I also found that there is a bug in the version of the synth plug-in I have. I'll try again some time.

I got a little help with my MIDI issues on the #opensourcemusicians IRC channel. It's a fairly active channel that includes the people behind the associated podcast. Getting useful information on Linux audio can be tricky. A lot of How To documents are very old, but there are a few resources I look to:

• Planet Linux Musicians takes feeds from lots of relevant blogs to give a good overview of what is going on.
• Linux Musicians forum is not very busy, and plagued with spam, but has some knowledgable members.
• Dave Phillips at Linux Journal writes some great articles on what is new in audio.
• Linux Audio wiki has articles on a lot of available applications and hardware.

I still see a need for some more approachable reference material for people who don't know much about Linux, but want to make music. They need guides on what sets of applications they could use for various scenarios and how they connect together. In some cases the information is out there, but it's spread across various sites, including video demos. I may try collaborating with others on one of the wikis to try and bring it all together so people have somewhere to start. I should learn more myself in the process.

I've pondered further on which interface to get. Current favourite is the M-Audio Delta 44. It's getting on a bit, but can handle 4 inputs at high quality. It should give lower latency than a USB unit. I've seen a few on ebay and will see if I can pick one up there.

I meant to mention a couple of friends in my latest post, but forgot. Dave contributed the MIDI adaptor and is crafting some fine looking guitars at the moment. He was one of the gang who went to Hamburg with my last year and a fine musician.

My good friend Malcolm has an amazing home studio full of vintage synthesisers and other gear. He has long been hampered by a lack of funds to construct a PC capable of realising his ideas, but has managed to build one now. He has written an extensive piece on the reasons for choosing all the parts. It's a mega machine, but pretty affordable. I got to see it in the 'flesh' at the Herts LUG meeting last week. It's huge, but the passive heatsinks and big, slow fans mean it's very quiet. I'm jealous, but can't justify a new build just now. My PC seems to handle what I want for now, but I will look at making it quieter.

He didn't use the new PC for it, but Malc has finally got some of his old recordings on-line. I'd like to see him using something like SoundCloud, but he prefers to host it himself.

MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a pretty old system. It's a simple serial protocol that dates back about 30 years. I remember a friend making an interface to hook up to the serial port of his computer, an Acorn Electron I believe. It still seems to be the default interface for sending note and other information between all sorts of gear. Modern kit may be sending it via USB or even within the PC to virtual instruments, but I think it's still pretty much the same.

About 15 years ago I bought a Casio CTK-530 keyboard to learn to play piano. The sounds are okay, but it has a five octave velocity sensitive keyboard. My kids have since also used it a lot. I think I have had it working with a PC via a cable that attached to the games port, but I recently realised this PC does not have that port. Luckily a friend had a spare USB MIDI adaptor that he sent me. It's an M-Audio Uno. I hooked it up, but nothing at all happened. A little research revealed I needed to install the midisport-firmware package. A quick reboot later I had some lights flashing on it.

I could see the Uno (as MidiSport) in the Jack ALSA tab. I wanted to get it playing sounds in Qsynth, but that is in the MIDI tab. I had to set the Jack MIDI driver to raw or seq to get the interface to appear as n output under MIDI. Then I could use my keyboard to trigger some of the nice sounds in the basic soundfont I have installed. I may have to look at some of the other sample libraries out there.

I also had to check if the Casio would receive MIDI. I loaded up a file in Rosegarden and selected the MidiSport as output. Out it came in spectacular cheesy 80s style. Not sure I need this capability for recording, but it's nice to have everything working.

This is actually the second piece of MIDI gear the studio has gained in the last week or so. I bought a Korg nanoKONTROL to give me some convenient control over the recording process. That really was plug and play. It was very simple to select it in Jack and then assign controls to any feature of Ardour. I need to experiment further with programming it using the Korg software that works on Linux via Wine. It has limitations, but it was cheap and fits on my crowded desk. I mentioned that I considered the Akai MPK Mini, but that cost a bit more and I didn't really need another keyboard.

There are still lots more Linux audio applications for me to experiment with. I did have a play with Rakarrack. It has a bewildering selection of effects with loads of parameters. I tried the presets, some of which didn't work. There's some interesting noises in there. I used their 'Satriani' preset on this track just to try it out.