Re: debian port of timidity doesn't work here

[Seeker5528 <seeker5528@comcast.net>]

On Sat, 1 Sep 2007 00:49:12 -0500 (CDT)
Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@shellworld.net> wrote:

> I figured to use timidity to listen to some midi files and found out 
> missing instruments make that impossible.  Would it be better to convert 
> the midi files to another format and listen to them that way and if so 
> which format and what tool does that conversion? 

Timidity does conversion and depending on the speed of your computer
conversion may be the best option.

To get a good sound out of timidity I use soundfonts. You can find
some at:

http://www.personalcopy.com/home.htm

: In the Linux  section personal copy and unison are good. If you go to
their normal soundfont page and from there go to the big soundfonts
there is a lite version of personal copy also music theory 2 and
RealFont 2.1 are good choices, you will need the sfark extraction
utility to unpack the sfark and sfark.exe files for use:

http://www.melodymachine.com/sfark.htm

: Once you have your chosen soundfont extracted, put it
in /usr/share/sounds/sf2, then edit /etc/timidity.cfg, just before the
line that points to freepats.cfg put a line in that points to the
soundfont:

soundfont /usr/share/sounds/sf2/PCLite.sf2 order=0

: I'm using personal copy lite at the moment, but normally prefer the
larger soundfonts, the order=0 tells timidity to look at the soundfont
for instruments first, if it doesn't find an instrument in the soundfont
it will look at the freepats instruments.

If you want to use timidity in alsa sequencer mode uncomment the line
in /etc/default/timidity that enables it, then open a terminal window
and type:

/etc/init.d/timidity start

: this will create a timidity alsa device for midi applications to use,
I believe you have to go into the options of each individual midi
application and choose the timidity alsa device.

If you want to convert the midi to audio look at the timidity man page
for the output options, I think there are options for ogg, flac, and
wav and maybe a couple others, no option for mp3.

Later, Seeker