LinuxSampler may not be available in the repository of your Linux because of license reasons. You can use it anyway by downloading the package from http://www.linuxsampler.org. These are not very new, and they're only available as 32 bit (i386) packages, and not as 64 bit (amd64) packages. So another idea is to download the sources and build the program yourself. This may seem a bit difficult for people who don't have experience with it. This page describes how to do it.

I (onnonymous in the forum) have tested this on Ubuntu Lucid 32 bit and Ubuntu Maverick 64 bit, but on Maverick some things don't work very well.

First, we download the source of linuxsampler. You can use your browser and go to www.linuxsampler.org or go to a command line and use the following commands.

wget http://download.linuxsampler.org/packages/linuxsampler-1.0.0.tar.bz2

You may have to change the URL when a newer version is available.

We unpack the source:

bunzip2 linuxsampler-1.0.0.tar.bz2
tar -xvf linuxsampler-1.0.0.tar

We enter the directory that contains the source.

cd linuxsampler-1.0.0

Now we run the configure script. This script checks if your system has all the requirements to build linuxsampler from source.

./configure

This command produces a lot of output. You may see some error messages, for instance if you don't have the right compiler installed. If it complains, install the packages it asks for and try again, until the last line says “Good. Now type 'make' to compile, followed by 'make install' as root.”

I installed the program sqlite because the configure script asked me:

sudo apt-get install sqlite

Somewhere in the output you can see which platforms are supported:

#-------------------------------------------------------------------
# MIDI Input Drivers:
# ALSA: yes, JACK: no, CoreMIDI: no, MME: no, MidiShare: no
#-------------------------------------------------------------------
# Audio Output Drivers:
# ALSA: yes, JACK: no, ARTS: no, CoreAudio: no, ASIO: no
#-------------------------------------------------------------------
# Building sampler as plugin for following host standards:
# DSSI: no, LV2: yes, VST: no, AU: no

In this example, you can see that Jack is not supported! Since Jack is cool, it is a good idea to fix this. We can do that by installing another package. You can do that with this command (or with your favorite package manager):

On Ubuntu Maverick:

sudo apt-get install libjack-jackd2-dev

On Ubuntu Lucid:

sudo apt-get install libjack-dev

It can be very useful to also build the plugins (DSSI and LV2, I couldn't get VST to work). With these, you can use linuxsampler as a plugin in a DAW. To build plugins, we need a few more dev packages.

On Lucid:

sudo apt-get install libslv2-dev 
sudo apt-get install dssi-dev

On Maverick, installing libslv2-dev failed because of a rather silly dependency problem (sorry for the Dutch error messages):

 krb5-multidev : Vereisten: libkrb5-3 (= 1.8.1+dfsg-5) maar 1.8.1+dfsg-5ubuntu0.1 zal geïnstalleerd worden
                 Vereisten: libk5crypto3 (= 1.8.1+dfsg-5) maar 1.8.1+dfsg-5ubuntu0.1 zal geïnstalleerd worden
                 Vereisten: libgssapi-krb5-2 (= 1.8.1+dfsg-5) maar 1.8.1+dfsg-5ubuntu0.1 zal geïnstalleerd worden

Basically, the package managers changed the version number for some packages but forgot to update the dependancy list for other packages to reflect this. It doesn't show this directly, but it will show up when you try to install the packages that libslv2-dev complains about.

But also this package gave a problem: dssi-dev. This package depends on an older version of Jack, so it suggested to downgrade 11 packages, and to remove Ardour! You may want to think again before doing that on Maverick.

If you have installed the requested packages, you may have to run the configure script again.

./configure

Then you can start building it:

make
sudo make install

Try if it works by running it:

linuxsampler --help

Now, install Qsampler if you haven't done so already, and have fun!