Audacious and MIDI files

[Aere Greenway]

On 08/25/2013 02:57 AM, Lars Noodén wrote:
> Thanks for that.  The Fluidsynth plugin for VLC worked on the first try.
>   Audacious, or something it depends on, seems to be lacking in some way.
Lars:

I applaud the VLC developers in their efforts to make their application 
so easy to use, that it worked for me (and you) on the first try.

It's a bit more work to get Audacious to work.  You actually have to 
configure a soundfont for it.

In Audacious, click:

File...Preferences

In the dialog that appears, click the "Plugins" entry in the left pane, 
then click the "Input" tab.

In the right pane, click on the "AMIDI-Plug (MIDI Player)" entry (making 
sure it is checked).

Then click the "Preferences" button at the bottom.

In the dialog that appears, in the left pane, click the "FluidSynth 
backend" entry.  The information displayed will change.

In the "SoundFont settings" pane, there probably will be no soundfont 
file displayed.

Click the "+" button (upper right) to add one.

In the window that appears, browse to "/usr/share/sounds/sf2/" and click 
on the FluidR3_GM.sf2" file, then click the "Open" button (bottom right).

If you're tight on computer RAM space, the "TimGM6mb.sf2" file would be 
a good alternative.

Whew!

What a lot to go through to get this to work!

As a general observation (my opinion), Linux developers are great at 
creating wonderful software tools, but are not so good at making them 
easy to use, or in documenting how to use them.

I hope when people start seeing my new software (coming soon to an 
Internet near you), that the will think better of me regarding ease of 
use, and documentation of the software.

-- 
Sincerely,
Aere