Thank you all for the kind reviews and especially for your encouragement and suggestions. Many I already recognize, all are welcome and considered.

I do have a whack of sound fonts of all sorts of qualities; the selection from that pool is not in my control, it is part of the generative process, so if a piece maps to cheesy retro sounds, then that’s what I get. As I often tell people, you may prefer reading the spam itself :)

What I do need, however, is better gear; I’m a poor artist, house full of kids, mortgage, you know the drill, and there just isn’t the budget for fancy gear. All I have at my disposal for realization is the same machine that receives the spams, Linux on an old P3/600, using Timidity++ and, as I said, all sorts of fonts, pretty much all the SoundFont files I can find in GM format. Unfortunately, there’s something about the process that I just don’t understand and quite often the rendered tracks are full of nasty clicks like old vinyl — if anyone can tell me how to improve my sound quality given the gear I have, I’ll sing your praises forever.

In the meantime, at least it is soundfonts, and not OPL3 FM instruments, thank our lucky stars for that :)

Seriously, though, this is "electronic" music: How can it have any quality other than being "electronic"? My first works were done with a razor blade and 2-track reels, Cage started the whole thing rolling with stereo test records and radio samples. Does "timbre" still have any meaning? Can one sound be intriniscally "better" than any other? Really, honestly, how? That’s my attitude anyway.

The purpose of this sort of music is to generate an environment outside of the concerns and expectations of my ego; the music just is, and it is what it is. Texture, ambience, environment.

So much for the compositional process but … Aye, how it then gets to our ears … THAT’s where I’d love to crank it up a notch or two. MIDI triggered samples from CCMixter … Can I do that in Linux?

I’ve been looking at BEAST, and thinking "Hmmm …. this too is lexical …"

" pretty much all the SoundFont files I can find in GM format"

This could be your first problem, the GM soundfonts out there are notoriously the worst ones. You should be using individual instrument fonts where they have been specialized for the instrument or group/class of instruments. Even among the freebie SF world you’ll be shocked at the uptick in sound quality when you make that step.

"rendered tracks are full of nasty clicks like old vinyl"

typically this is something like a latency buffer that is too small. Your audio interface hardware (i.e. soundcard) should have a ‘buffer’ amount in it’s setup and you need to increase that. This will add latency in performance so you have strike a balance between what you can tolerate in terms of MIDI performance latency (delay) and clicks/pops in your output.

"MIDI triggered samples from CCMixter … Can I do that in Linux?"

http://google.com/search?q=...