So you got a shiny new Fantom X or Juno G synth from your local Guitar Center, whatever. You're messing around with it and it's great, except you kinda wanna try out the PC connection features. If you're running Linux, you seem pretty out of luck. I mean, you can use the storage abilities if you have your memory card in (which I don't at the present, the JG takes forever to boot with it in there), but what you really wanna do is use software to write out your music.
Now, in my quest for great software for not only sequencing, but also writing out Sheet Music, I encountered Rosegarden on Sourceforge (
http://www.rosegardenmusic.com is the official site). At first glance, you don't see too much, but when you dig into it, you find an easy-to-setup MIDI control system on the left side. But there's one problem. You can't use your Juno-G just yet... because chances are that ALSA does not support it. As of ALSA's 1.0.15 release, the Juno-G is fully supported. The reason your ALSA won't support it is because a lot of the repositories (for distros such as Ubuntu and SuSE) are not so quick at putting up new versions of anything (the latest ALSA in the ubuntu repos is 1.0.13). As such, you are most likely going to need to compile ALSA yourself.
So how do we compile it ourselves? Well, it would seem complicated, but it is not. Head on over to ALSA's site (
http://www.alsa-project.org) and grab the alsa-driver-1.0.15 download (it's in the pink box on the right side). Once you have downloaded the file, you should open up a terminal and cd over to where you saved alsa-driver-1.0.15.bz2. Then, it's as simple as this...
~$ tar xvf alsa-driver-1.0.15.tar.bz2
~$ cd alsa-driver-1.0.15
~/alsa-driver-1.0.15$ ./configure
~/alsa-driver-1.0.15$ make
~/alsa-driver-1.0.15$ sudo make install
After the make install, you should have your shiny new version of ALSA all ready to go. So open up your audio program of choice (I highly recommend Rosegarden, I guarantee you that it will be the perfect companion for your Juno), open up the MIDI device manager and make sure of where your keyboard is being used, then away you go. On the keyboard itself, you can choose what patches you want (the Juno-G's Perform mode is excellent for this, as it also lets you save your configuration) and on what channels, and then on your computer, you program your notes. Simple!
I hope this little guide will help someone. I've spent the better part of this morning getting everything all ready to go, and it has been fantastic.
Note: There are a few reasons I love Rosegarden. Even though I don't use its audio plugins at all (I don't like Jack, Jack doesn't like me, either), it is great for programming musical notation (read: you can write sheet music with free software... take that you Windows composers!), and it has a very clean interface and is incredibly easy to use.
Also, if you don't have an external synth, Rosegarden is GREAT for composing with softsynths, also. If for some reason you're without a synth temporarily, you can route everything to other programs (like LMMS,
http://lmms.sourceforge.net).
Other note: This is only for Linux d00ds. There is support for the Juno-G on both OSX and Windows, and you can get what you need at Roland's website (
http://www.rolandus.com).
Seeya!
