Introduction
Rosegarden is a MIDI and audio sequencer and musical notation editor. Rosegarden allows you to record, arrange, and compose music, in the shape of traditional score or MIDI data, or of audio files either imported or recorded from a microphone, guitar or whatever audio source you care to specify. You can use Rosegarden to write, edit, and organise music to create a composition, which you can then synthesise, add effects to, and mix down for burning to CD or distribution on the web. Rosegarden also contains well-rounded notation editing support for high quality printed output.
Rosegarden is designed to look and act in a manner familiar to experienced users coming to Linux from other platforms, whilst also being accessible and friendly to users new to music software generally.
This handbook summarises the capabilities of Rosegarden and provides a reference for some of the concepts involved. It's designed to make sense either read in order or used as a reference to the concepts and functions available in Rosegarden. If you would like to read a tutorial as well, you can find one here.
If there's something else that you don't understand or require further help with, please visit the Rosegarden website for Frequently Asked Questions and mailing list instructions.
This handbook usually refers to the functions you can use in Rosegarden by describing where they live on the menus. For example, the function to add a single new track to the main track editor is ->.
In many cases, this is not the only way to reach a particular function. In this case the same function is also available through the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+T, and it also appears as an icon on one of the main window's toolbars. Both the keyboard shortcut and the icon can quickly be learned, because they are shown on the menu in Rosegarden alongside the name of the function. You should bear in mind that although we always give the full menu location in this documentation for reference purposes, it's not necessarily the best or most usual way to use a function, and you should keep an eye on the keyboard shortcuts or toolbar icons as well.
This Handbook assumes that your Rosegarden installation supports all the features of which it is capable. Some of Rosegarden's features, including some very major ones, are actually optional when building a Rosegarden installation, depending on which other libraries and supporting code is available. For example, the whole audio subsystem is only compiled in if JACK libraries are available; synth plugin support depends on a number of other modules; etc.
These dependencies are documented in the Rosegarden README and configuration documentation. If you find that this Handbook refers to features not visible in the version of Rosegarden you're using, consult your configuration documentation or distributor.
