[Preston] ALSA Demo -- Planned and Possible Demo Items

[Matthew T. Atkinson]

'ellow,

On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 08:46, Dougie Nisbet wrote:
> I don't know if anyone on the list is interested but I've just stumbled across 
> a package that does exactly what I want. It's called 'hydrogen' and it is 
> specifically for drum tabs which is what I was after. It's a really snazzy 
> program. 

Cool; glad you found something that does what you want.

> I installed timidity a few weeks ago but couldn't get my head around it. From 
> the limited amount of googling I did it seems a lot of folk run it in daemon 
> mode? I keep thinking of trying to learn a bit about the whole MIDI thing but 
> everytime I dip a toe in the water I end up being thoroughly bewildered. I 
> think the main problem is that I'm too lazy to sit down and read the docs. 

Never heard of running it in daemon mode -- don't really see how it
could be of any major use, to be honest, but I must be missing
something.

You need timidity (the player program) and some voice banks (a GM sound
set) for it to actually make sound.  I am pretty sure that when you use
the Debian packages, everything you need is installed (or at least
``recommended'').

Incidentally timidity works by interpreting the MIDI file and playing
sounds from the sound bank back as the MIDI file specifies.  This means
that it turns a MIDI file into raw wave output and pipes it to your
sound card/daemon -- kind of like mpg321, ogg123 and/or flac do for more
traditionally compressed audio data.

This is what the sound card would do by itself in hardware (and can --
find out how at my demo, hehe!) but it means that you don't need a sound
card / MIDI capable sound card to play MIDIs of a high quality.  Say you
might have a card that can only do FM (as opposed to wave table)
synthesis -- you can use timidity to play MIDIs that sound better.

bye just now,


-- 
Matthew T. Atkinson <matthew at agrip.org.uk>