Buzz machines is by far the most fabulous modular tracker / synthesizer I've ever used. It was developped by Oskari Tammelin early in 1997. I've been using it for many years now, under windows 98 first. If you want to use it under win2000 or above, you need to update buzz.exe (right-click) to set the compatibility mode. This is because buzz software was not updated since 2000 (the author lost the code!). However, many new machines have been developped since then, making buzz an incredible composition tool. For details, please have a look at www.buzzmachines.com
Buzz runs pretty well under wine, please find below instructions to install it (on a fedora core 6).
1) let's install wine, the windows emulator for linux
sudo yum install wine
In order to have a full midi functionnality, you need to setup wine to use alsa driver :
winecfg
Be sure that you select hardware acceleration : Emulation.
2) [optional] install Virtual keyboard
sudo yum install vkeybd
This will allow you to emulate a midi keyboad. However if you have a real midi keyboard, this is better.
For my french keyboard, I used the following
.vkeybdmap :
global keymap
set keymap {
{less 7}
{q 8}
{w 9}
{s 10}
{x 11}
{c 12}
{f 13}
{v 14}
{g 15}
{b 16}
{n 17}
{j 18}
{comma 19}
{k 20}
{semicolon 21}
{l 22}
{colon 23}
{exclam 24}
{a 24}
{eacute 25}
{z 26}
{quotedbl 27}
{e 28}
{r 29}
{parenleft 30}
{t 31}
{minus 32}
{y 33}
{egrave 34}
{u 35}
}
If you want to update it , you can have a look at the keymaps definitions :
vi /lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/azerty/fr.map.gz
3) Download and install Jeskola Buzz
Open
www.buzzmachines.com then select download. I suggest that you take the massive pack in oder to have all the machines.
Then you can download the latest machines from the website.
To install Buzz, you just need to execute the .exe file and follow the instructions, exactly as you would do for windows.
4) Play
To start playing with buzz, you simply need to launch the executable that is in your ~/.wine/drive_c/Progam files/Jeskola .
The easiest way to do that is to create an alias called buzz, that you can put in your .bashrc :
alias buzz='wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Jeskola\ Buzz/Buzz.exe'
then you can lauch buzz whenever you want by typing
buzz.
Here is a screenshot of buzz under wine :
Update the configuration to setup your midi keyboard. (view -> preferences -> midi )