For program version 1.2
Patroneo (which is Esperanto for “Pattern”) is an easy to use pattern based midi sequencer that handles the three most important musical parameters: pitch, rhythm and dynamics.
Patroneo is primarily designed for educational purposes, where the main goal is to teach the importance of patterns and repetitions in any kind of music. However, Patroneo is a full sequencer you can use to create real music. The constraints it presents will more likely boost your creativity than suppressing it.
Workflow summary: You have tracks with one pattern each. Turn on steps in the pattern to play musical notes. Switch the patterns on and off in a sequence to create a song structure. Connect external synthesizers and samplers to create sounds.
This README is just a short introduction. Consult the manual (see below) for more information.
If the latest release is not available through your package manger you can build it yourself: Download the latest code release on https://www.laborejo.org/downloads and extract it.
It is possible to clone a git repository.
git clone --recurse-submodules https://laborejo.org/patroneo.git
If you want to update at a later date you must use
git pull --recurse-submodules
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
There are multiple ways to run Patroneo which should give you the flexibility to configure your system as you want.
We make no distinction if you installed Patroneo yourself or through the distributions package-manager.
The differences are: With or without NSM, with or without sound, installed or from the source dir. The permutations are too many to describe them all in detail, but here are some useful modes:
Starting Patroneo through the Non Session Manager after you installed patroneo system-wide
is the recommended and only supported way. Start non-session-manager and load or create a new
session. Then use the button “Add Client to Session” and type in patroneo.
It should appear with an icon in the list and open its GUI.
You need to start patroneo from a terminal (or create a starter script).
patroneo --save DIRECTORY
Uses the given directory to save. The dir will be created or loaded from if already present. Use the applications file menu to save (Ctrl+s).
You can use this to load and save the files from an existing NSM session. If you create a new directory you can copy it manually to an NSM session directory, but that requires renaming the directory to append the unique ID provided by NSM.
Sending SIGUSR1 to the program in this mode will trigger a save.
Closing through your window manager in this mode will actually quit the application without a prompt to save changes.
You can run Patroneo after extracting the release archive or cloning from git, without installation.
“Calfbox” is the name of our internal realtime midi/audio python module.
./configure and make calfbox without subsequent install, which creates a site-packages directory in the source dir.patroneo --mute which runs without sound at all and does not need calfbox.The developer uses this way to develop and use the software, so it will always be as stable as the compiled version. But it is a bit less performant than building and installing it.
After extracting the release archive create a symlink from patroneo into your PATH. e.g. /usr/bin
or ~/bin, if that exists on your system.
If you compiled without installing you can also symlink to ./patroneo.bin
Use ./patroneo --save (see above). If you compiled without installing you can also run ./patroneo.bin
Combining the above options you can start the program directly after unpacking or cloning from git:
./patroneo --save /tmp --mute
Or even shorter:
./patroneo -s /tmp -m
This is the minimal run mode which is only useful for testing and development. But if you only want to look at the GUI and are not in the mood to install anything -including dependencies-, go ahead.