After having updated to Ubuntu 22.04, I recently wanted to reactivate my music work environment. But when I installed Musescore‑3 and let it play my music score, I got an ugly mess of background noises. And I could not add any soundfont. Obviously, I faced two obstacles that I had to overcome
Ubuntu 22.04 offers both, Musescore‑2 and Musescore‑3. I had already had good experiences with Musescore‑3. Thus — and to be on the safe side — I completely removed the older release, before I installed my preferred version:
sudo apt-get remove --purge musescore
sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt-get install musescore3Then I opened my standard test song in Musescore‑3. And I got a mess of noises while I tried to play it. The internet told me, that there seems to be a bug evoked by using pulse-audio and musescore‑3 together. MuseScore‑3 should supposedly reduce the pulse latency to an unusable small value.
If this was true, I should be able to fix it by overriding the current pulse latency value using an appropriate environment variable. So I opened up a bash, entered ‘export PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30‘, and called ‘musecore3‘ from the command line. And indeed: no more disturbing playback noises. But when I started Musescore‑3 via the official menu – (i.e. without evaluating the environment variable set in the shell), the noises ‘came back’. So I verified the suspected cause. Next, all I had to do was to convince Ubuntu 22.04 to set this pulse latency value within the boot procedure. For this, I had to add a specific shell file into the profile.d directory:
sudo echo "export PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30" > /etc/profile.d/pulselat.shFrom now on, the musescore‑3 version that comes with Ubuntu 22.04 plays my score without any annoying noises.
But that did not affect the phenomenon of ‘lost’ sound fonts. Whenever I stored a new sound file into my directory ‘MuseScore3/SoundFonts‘ for making them accessible in accordance with the documentation, Musescore did not find them. But this time — as so often — the cause sat in front of the keyboard: Recently, I had changed my home directory. But in this new directory, I still used the old content — unchanged. Therefore, paths containing my previous directory still showed up in the Musescore‑3 configuration dialog. I could put as many new sound files in my sound directory as I wanted. Musescore did not find them. To fix this, I had to update the older names in the Musescore‑3 configuration file ‘~/.config/MuseScore/MuseScore.ini‘ for making the fluid-R3-GM-Soundfont and the arachno-soundfont accessible.
And in what way is this …
… part of the overarching topic FOSS ? Well, my professional life is dominated by free software and open source compliance. But sometimes I find more offbeat tools that are still worth sharing — at least with my forgetful future ‘me’. To whom I like to recommend — for example — suitable, advanced editors. Or ancient preparatory work. Or some free music editors for compositoy work. But with some posts, I just want to remind my later ‘me’ of attitudes, points of view, and attitudes. So that I don’t fall behind myself. That’s what it’s about in here too.