Guitar playing on Debian 7.1

I don’t count the times I used Linux for several topics: programming, web browsing, watching movies, etc…
But one of the point that really blocks me to ban Windows OS was the guitar playing under Linux.

I’ve starting using linux in 1997 and even few years ago I struggled under several specific linux music distributions. Event under Ubuntu Studio I found that is was always a pain to use softwares (but it was easier, the effort done by the communities were making believe it a little bit more).

And now my dream came true. It happened on my favorite distribution. I’ve recently installed Debian 7.1 and the whole environment really rocks. It is done on my old thinkpad T43 and it is working !

First my Behringer UCA 202 is working out of the box. Just plug it and that’s ok!

Then I can use guitar effects like guitarix with jackd enabled to play with my clean electric guitar and get some interesting effects.

Furthermore TuxGuitar had real improvments and now I can open all my guitar pro tabs until gp5 without any problem. The only annonying thing is that you have to « geek » a little bit to find a « midi player ».
I’ve chosen « timidity » and I’m running it like this: « timidity -iA » (to use alsa).

Now all is ok, I just have to play ;=)

Of course, I’ll let installed my old Windows XP. And if there is no more use of it I’ll free some gigs of my laptop 😉