Ubuntu and Midi

[Nathan Sprangers]

On Thu, 2004-12-16 at 08:32 +0100, Sebastian Müsch wrote:
> 
> 
> Nathan Sprangers wrote:
> 
> > I must preface this post with this comment: I am extremely impressed
> > with Ubuntu and all that it's doing - this is in no way a complaint but
> > a request.
> > 
> > Now, the one thing that I need in Ubuntu to make it complete is better
> > midi support. I don't have an audio card that supports midi however, so
> > what I'm talking about is midi synth.  As a musician there are two apps
> > that I would like to use that I can't right now: Rosegarden4 (notation
> > software, anyone know of a gtk subsitute?) and Solfege.  I have tried
> > installing timidity from the Ubuntu repositories and timidity-patches
> > from Debian stable, however timidity is a nightmare to configure.  MIDI
> > is something that I think should *just work* - as so many other things
> > in Ubuntu do!
> > 
> > So my question is: has anyone else been able to successfully get midi
> > synth on Ubuntu?  Midi and sound seem to be a common problem in Ubuntu
> > without much of a solution - at least that's my observation.
> 
> The question is, which soundcard you are using. If it's emu10k1
> (soundblaster live and onwards) based card, the midi support is available
> via alsa ... and you have a sounfont-library already on the cd, that came
> with your soundcard ;-)

AFAIK the sound card in my old Beige G3 PowerPC has no built-in midi
sounds.  On the mac side I've always relied on Quicktime midi synth. I'm
sure that there are other people who don't have a SB card as well.

> The main problem with midi-support in almost all distributions is, that only
> a few people use it on linux as there's no software available like Cubase,
> Logic and other nice musician-toys. The second problem is, that imho there's
> no "good" soundbank available that's "free" (in the kind of released under
> the gpl). Windows like all other mayor os's have some soundbanks, that
> already included, but imho all linux distributions have none.

Actually, in Debian stable main there is timidity-patches which contains
a ton of sound fonts.  Since I haven't been able to get these to work
perhaps it's like you say and they're  not "good" =)

~Nathan