Midi and Music Composition on FreeBSD

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

I can't help you with your request. If nobody else should be able to
help you, the following might help you, to decide using another
operating system.

Back in 2012 I installed FreeBSD, because I experienced issues with a
RME HDSPe AIO sound card running Linux. On FreeBSD I got audio working
with too much latency for real-time usage. IIRC I didn't tested MIDI,
however, it's possible to experience an amount of MIDI jitter, that
renders MIDI unusable for making music, since MIDI jitter already is an
issue for real-time capable PCs.

BSD and Linux are niches and audio for making music is a niche inside
the niche, or words to that effect said by one of the more prominently
Linux audio developers about Linux.

Consider to dual-boot/multi-boot FreeBSD and Linux and to use Linux for
MIDI applications, using the Linux kernel with boot option 'threadirqs'
or using linux-rt, a patched kernel. Both require some additional
settings, some could be done automatically by using the script rtirq.

Arch Linux provides binary packages and a FreeBSD ports-like build
system.

https://www.archlinux.org/
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System
http://archaudio.org/
https://aur.archlinux.org/
https://wiki.archlinux.org/

As a FreeBSD user you unlikely want

https://ubuntustudio.org/

an official Ubuntu flavour, OTOH it might be the most easiest to use
Linux distro for testing purpose, but OTOH the allegedly user-friendly
approach comes with many pitfalls.

Regards,
Ralf