midi files in (k)ubuntu

[Peter Garrett]

On Sat, 12 Nov 2005 21:37:44 +0300
Makurin Roman <drolyk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All
> May be its a strange question, but how can I play midi files in ubuntu ? I 
> can`t find any obvious way to do this. I`ve got Creative SBLive 5.1 sound 
> card wich works wery well with alsa.

The simplest way appears to be to do this:

1) Install the " timidity" package and the "freepats" package ( freepats is a set of patch files that timidity looks for by default - you can also use a sound font, but this is a bit more involved)

2) If you want a GUI for timidity, rather than plain command line, install  "timidity-interfaces-extra " This package gives you a few relatively OK front ends for the player. Of course they don't make it clear that you need to run 

timidity -ig

to get the GTK+ GUI  (hey, I had to dig around in the man pages for timidity to work this out ;) ) . If you like a retro look you can also run 

timidity -ia

which I think is a coloured Athena widget set. Looks like the best 1993 had to offer, but if you like dark grey with tasteful dabs of olive green and violet, it might be just what you wanted...

If you have freepats and timidity, it *should* work "out of the box".  (Sounds of hollow laughter).  Just run " timidity -ig yourmidi.mid " or "timidity yourmidi.mid " for the straight version without pretty boxes.

Troubleshooting:  Timidity looks for freepats - see  

/etc/timidity/timidity.cfg
/etc/timidity/freepats.cfg

More complicated stuff:

You can run timidity in "server" mode , in conjunction with apps like rosegarden4 ( a really nice app once you get it working) and kmid. This is left, as they say, as "an exercise for the reader"  ;-) It does work, eventually, but involves far more hacking about than it should. You will read about jackd, and tear your hair out trying to get everything playing nicely together. A few magic incantations that work with varying degrees of success to use timidity for these purposes are

timidity -iA -B2,8 -Os1l -s 44100
timidity -iA -B4,12 -Oj -s 44100     #better, it seems
timidity -iA -B2,8 -s 44100            # this works too ?

The comments are from my experiments , on my set-up. YMMV , as they say. These spells are ways of starting timidity in server mode - after starting these you have to "tune in " with kmidi or rosegarden4 , and connect to port 128:0 if I remember correctly. (It's been a while since I played with this so I might be off target here). I also had to modprobe some sequencing modules ( snd_seq springs to mind, but there are others). If you need to do this, remember to add the modules to /etc/modules so they will load on boot.

See? It's all really user-friendly!  ( *cough* )

You will hone your googling skills, and see many lines roughly interpretable as " the rest of this configuration is trivial, and requires no comment". Keep a sense of humour if you decide to delve more deeply... 

Unless of course, unlike me, you actually understand the terminology and concepts involved, in which case it's no doubt simplicity itself ...

A starting point might be

http://linux-sound.org/

Do read the timidity man page. It contains much that is useful. If you're like me, you won't understand much of it, but a bit of perseverance pays dividends.

Good luck !

Peter


-- 

Linux User #343161