please don't misunderstand me, i'm pretty sure your intentions are good and, in fact, really appreciated. however... there's a couple of things you should have in mind about qtractor's mission and design:
qtractor was and still is meant to be a part of the Linux audio/MIDI ecosystem, not the whole of it--how important that part is is entirely up to you--that is, it doesn't live on its own as a stand-alone sound and music production application. as i'm often found repeating it ad nauseam, qtractor is not a DAW rather an audio/MIDI sequencer with (some) DAW features.
as you already realized, you'll need MIDI sound generators, like synths or samplers, either in MIDI instrument plug-in form or external stand-alone soft-instruments, or even plain outboard hardware, to render MIDI stuff; qtractor is NOT like the all-in-one monolithic wonder applications that you usually find in the full-fledged DAWs out there.
iow. qtractor is some kind of a hybrid: it's not quite a monolith and not pure modular-to-the-bone, it's something in between and, on my watch, will stay like that for many and lasting years to come :)
finally, qtractor has no capital(istic) nor commercial agenda whatsoever; although a growing user-base might be certainly beneficial (to its own ego), it is NOT a life-and-death condition.
re. There must be some open source instruments available, but I'm having a hard time finding them.
don't tell me you've been living under a rock :D just kidding.
oh no, not again :)
please don't misunderstand me, i'm pretty sure your intentions are good and, in fact, really appreciated. however... there's a couple of things you should have in mind about qtractor's mission and design:
qtractor was and still is meant to be a part of the Linux audio/MIDI ecosystem, not the whole of it--how important that part is is entirely up to you--that is, it doesn't live on its own as a stand-alone sound and music production application. as i'm often found repeating it ad nauseam, qtractor is not a DAW rather an audio/MIDI sequencer with (some) DAW features.
as you already realized, you'll need MIDI sound generators, like synths or samplers, either in MIDI instrument plug-in form or external stand-alone soft-instruments, or even plain outboard hardware, to render MIDI stuff; qtractor is NOT like the all-in-one monolithic wonder applications that you usually find in the full-fledged DAWs out there.
iow. qtractor is some kind of a hybrid: it's not quite a monolith and not pure modular-to-the-bone, it's something in between and, on my watch, will stay like that for many and lasting years to come :)
finally, qtractor has no capital(istic) nor commercial agenda whatsoever; although a growing user-base might be certainly beneficial (to its own ego), it is NOT a life-and-death condition.
re. There must be some open source instruments available, but I'm having a hard time finding them.
don't tell me you've been living under a rock :D just kidding.
yours truly vee-ones are the nearest examples here found ;) but there are plenty of others, some with way greater prospects eg. linuxsampler (and would ya tell its official frond-end is also yours truly yet again?), zynaddsubfx or yoshimi">; i'd suggest you to try the awesome kxstudio and also get some acquaintance to the swiss army knife of linuxaudio ?
re. side note, it doesn't seem like using the mouse to create MIDI files is an option
please try:
that's it.
hth.
cheers