Audacious and MIDI files

[Leszek Lesner]

Am Sonntag, 18. August 2013, 14:01:04 schrieb Aere Greenway:
> On 08/18/2013 06:28 AM, Lars Noodén wrote:
> > Should Audacious be able to play MIDI files out of the box or is a
> > little user-supplied configuration considered necessary?  When I try to
> > load a MIDI file into Audacious, I get the following complaint when it
> > 
> > tries to actually play the file:
> > 	You have not selected any sequencer ports for MIDI
> > 	playback.  You can do so in the MIDI plugin preferences.
> > 
> > Regards,
> > /Lars
> 
> Lars:
> 
> I haven't used Audacious for playing MIDI, having run into the same
> thing, and not knowing what to configure, or how to configure it.
> 
> However, VLC has a Fluidsynth plugin.  Its package name is
> "vlc-plugin-fluidsynth".  Here is the description from its package:
> 
>      FluidSynth plugin for VLC
> 
>      This plugin adds support for playing MIDI file via the FluidSynth
> software
>      synthesizer to the VLC media player.
> 
> Since I have that plug-in, I tried playing one of my MIDI files using
> VLC, and it worked perfectly, with no additional configuration needed.
> 
> By the way, in my opinion, Fluidsynth (or its Qsynth GUI wrapper) is one
> of the very best software synthesizers around, and its default soundfont
> (FluidR3_GM) is also one of the best.
> 
> So with VLC, using this plug-in, you don't need a sound-card having
> hardware synthesizers (such as Soundblaster Live!, or Audigy 2).  It
> uses the Fluidsynth software synthesizer, which (when configured
> properly) will work even on a 450 megahertz machine.  I know this
> capability, because I test it regularly.

It is basically the same for audacious. It comes with the amidi plugin where 
you can choose either to use alsa as backend (for soundchips with hardware 
synthesizers) or the fluidsynth backend for fluidsynth stuff. You only need to 
set the correct path to the soundfont you want to use. (i.e. FluidR3_GM) 
For those who don't want such a big soundfont you can also get the very small 
but very good (for its size) soundfont TimGM6mb.sf2 from here: 
http://ocmnet.com/saxguru/Timidity.htm