On Sun, Dec 09, 2007 at 06:46:40PM -0500, fred smith wrote:
On Sun, Dec 09, 2007 at 07:37:41AM -0500, fred smith wrote:
Hi gang!
Running 5.1 with Gnome as the default desktop, but have installed KDE too so I can run kde apps.
Kmidi is the default midi player, so if I click on a midi file in firefox it brings up KMIDI.
Actually, it's KMID, not KMIDI.
KMIDI goes merrily along playing the file, but I get NO SOUND.
My motherboard has built in audio but it's disabled and I"m using an old Audiopci 128 card which seems to work fine for everything else. (Why? because it sounds MUCH better than the ac97 junk)
Clues for making midi work?
Looks as if it may be that KMID expects there to be either hardware support for midi (which this sound card does not provide--it's es1371) or a midi-to-something-else converter, such as timidity++ which also isn't present.
Seems strange that the system would install KMID without the other tools it needs...
Anyway, I don't seem to be able to find a RH5/Centos5-compatible timidity++ build anywywere. I tried recently to build it and gave up with a series of errors that I didn't have the ambition to work around. Anyone know where I can find a suitable RPM for Timidity++?
Gracias!
OK, with a bunch of browsing and head-scratching I got it working. I"ll document here what I did in case anyone else needs to know.
First of all on a es1371 card there is no midi, and KMID expects some other agency to provide a MIDI sequencer, either hardware or another program.
I went back to the Timidity++ I had tried to build before and it built cleanly (I have no clue why it hadn't worked a few months ago). The various other postings I had found (in other fora) suggestedusing Timidity as a midi server by using the commandline: timidity -iA -B2,8 -Os1l -s 44100
I tried this, and as you might expect it failed because the vanilla Timidity++ build doesn't include some of the options you need to do this. Rerunning the ./configure in timidity++ with these options:
./configure --enable-alsaseq --with-default-output=alsa
gives me the services I need.
Then I could start Timidity as shown above.
once started, fire up KMID, go to SETTINGS | MIDI SETUP and choose one of the timidity ports. For me port 0 seems to work best (I have no clue what the others are for).
Configured that way I can play local midi files with KMID.
My next step is to see if it will work when KMID is started by Firefox. Yes!
NOTE: after installing Timidity++ you'll need a set of "voices", as Timidity comes with only a minimal set. The INSTALL file in the timidity source archive tells you places to look for such things. You'll also need to find or create a timidity config file telling where to find those files. Luckily I had a set of all those files lying around from a previous installation.
BTW, I used Timidity++2.13.2.
YMMV! :)
Good luck!