Re: current state of MIDI in Debian
Hi,
Slow reply, but I'm only slowly gaining insight into this area of Debian.
> > 1. casual user playing back SMF file
> >
> > A web browser invoking some player. Handled via MIME. Currently it
> > probably invokes timidity, since timidty+freepats is probably the only
> > thing in Debian supporting GM.
>
> As a casual user, I don't know what an SMF file is. Is this something to do
> with Flash? I suspect timidity+freepats is the only option.
SMF is a shorthand for 'Standard MIDI file', which consists of MIDI
data (which usually flows through the wire) in a file. The files which
end in '.mid' usually are SMF files. Your web browser usually tries to
invoke timidity or the like for such files.
> > 2. user using Debian as MIDI GM instrument
> >
> > vkeybd + timidity?
> >
> > running
> > timidity -Oj -iA
> > vkeybd
> >
> > resulted in a very latent MIDI keyboard. I'm not quite sure if it's my
> > local setup or it's fundamentally busted
>
> Probably better results using:
> External MIDI keyboard + JACK + Qsynth/fluidsynth
> You need JACK otherwise you get latency problems.
You don't really need jack for this setup; the latency won't be quite
noticable in this case. However, using something standard is nice.
I realize that for the above uses 1 and 2, having a default MIDI
connection is a plus, but for 3 and 4, having a pre-set default is not at all
reasonable or feasible.
Session-handling and session-configuration (starting apps and
connecting them) is probably what is really needed.
For 1, there is really no need to connect sequencers at all; it
probably just suffices to use timidity as the default parser for SMF
files, it will then happily play back SMF files to the default audio
output (which it might not be correct all the time, but that probably
needs fiximg).
regards,
junichi
--
dancer@{debian.org,netfort.gr.jp} Debian Project
Reply to: