Late Night PC Service

I like poking around in KDE to see what I've got installed. Yeah, I installed a bunch of applications with OpenSuse and didn't look at every one of them in detail. So what. My daughter gets a kick out of the desktop games that are on it, like Same Gnome (I know it's for Gnome but lots of my apps are and I'm impartial) and Frozen Bubble. I played a little Neverball - wild game, I haven't mastered it yet. The one I thought I'd talk about a little today though is a slick drumkit called Hydrogen. I'm only fooling around with it. It can do a lot more than what I understand about music. When you open up Hydrogen it has 3 windows inside the main window. There's a Song Editor, a Mixer and another piece with some global playback controls. The playback controls let you choose whether you want to play just a pattern or the entire song, stop, start rewind and fastforward playback and set the tempo of the song. 5146 In the Song Editor window you can turn on or off each of your patterns for different times throughout the song. What's a pattern? A pattern is basically an arrangement of sound samples. So you could have a cowbell and snare go back and forth for a few beats, for example. The cowbell is a sample and the snare drum is a sample, a specific combination that plays for a few beats is a pattern. You can have several patterns that use the same samples, patterns just make the samples easy to reuse. Double-clicking a pattern's name in the Song Editor window opens the Pattern Editor so you can add more cowbell (you know you want to). The Mixer lets you control the volume and balance of each sample independently. Controlling a sample globally across all patterns like this makes sense. A sample could be any one of a number of drums, bells or other repetitive sounds. Setting the balance and volume for the sample gives the listener a feel for where the instrument that makes the sound should be. I've glossed over the functionality in Hydrogen, but if you're into making music on Linux you can have a look at the features, screenies, and if you're really serious, the manual.