[HLUG] MIDI?????

[matt at spherica.demon.co.uk]

Sympathies, as I'm just getting into midi hacking here too. Here's where I've 
been with Ubuntu 5.04 and a Creative 'SB Live' soundcard, while trying to a) 
confirm the midi i/o port is active, b) check the soundcard's synthesiser can 
generate midi file-driven sounds, and c) that Rosegarden is capable of 
recording and reproducing keystrokes from a midi piano. I think you're just 
interested in (b) for now.

First, check how your soundcard is supported under Linux. Then check that 
you've got the correct drivers/modules loaded (I think the 'modprobe' command 
comes into force here). On top of that, you may need to download & install 
some 'sound fonts' into your soundcard (i.e. instrument sound definitions for 
the different MIDI channels to play), if it has none of its own native ones 
stored in ROM. Then if that look stable, try playing a simple midi file with 
e.g. 'pmidi'. If you hear nothing, check your sound mixer's appropriate 
faders are un-muted and open... if you can't seem to access the faders, try 
installing a better sound mixer app that suits your soundcard. 

All this should at least temporarily enable the playing of midi files by your 
soundcard, until you reboot whereupon you may lose the drivers/apps again. 
So...

Once you've got all this working manually via the command line, you may wish 
to automate [at boot-up time] the loading of the appropriate drivers, modules 
etc. in a config file, which will be peculiar to your distro I expect.

Here are a couple of links I've been hammering for insights:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/MIDI-HOWTO.html
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/MIDI-HOWTO-7.html (midi config)

Please, anyone else, welcome to fill in any gaps in the above!

Best of luck, many happy breakthroughs.

Regards,
Matt Rhys-Roberts
Leominster


On Tuesday 23 August 2005 21:44, David Shorthouse wrote:
> I have Suse9.1 installed the music(mp3s)Videos seem to work ok but I tried
> a midi file tonight & it wont play.. it looks like its playing it but no
> sound comes out. Do you have to install something else to get midi to
> play??? I checked the audio setting to make sure they were set to max on
> the mixer. I know the midi files play cos on my $indows machine they play
> fine. The player that was playing the files also found lyrics hidden in the
> files which I found amusing..
> If anyone knows if you need something else let me know
>
> Cheers
>
> Dave
>
> P.S im not installing Ubuntu :P
>
>
>
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