Re: midi problem with on board sound i810
Steve Kieu wrote:
>--snip--<
> Why kmidi can play (not mention about quality) but
> playmidi and kmid can't?
>
This has to do with how the actual musical sounds are generated. In
older sound cards (like the original SoundBlasters) the sound
"synthesis" was done with an on-board chip. The most popular method was
to use a FM Synthesis chip, like the OPL-2. In newer sound cards this
process is now done entirely in software and a "synthesis" chip is no
longer included on the sound card / chipset hardware.
The original GUS boards always used a software synthesis schema, and the
popular program TIMIDITY makes use of this process in a generic way to
provide a sequenced MIDI sound stream to the reqular audio input ports
of almost any sound card. Timididy has advanced over the years to be
able to use other "sound fonts" than the GUS patch set, but the GUS set
seems to be the most popular/widespread. Another software sound
synthesis engine is the "softoss2" driver found in your kernel modules.
I have never had much luck getting this one going. There may be
others.....
KMID and PLAYMIDI depend upon the presence of a properly configured
sound synthesizer and sequencer devices. In the older boards, this was
done automatically during install. The newer sound cards will NOT set
these devices up automatically when you install the card. You have to
set them up yourself, generally.
KMIDI is a KDE GUI "frontend" to Timidity. When you install this
program with the proper patch set, then the appropriate needed devices
are sort of "built-in" and you don't need them defined as system-wide
devices. In a sense, TIMIDITY (and hence KMIDI) ARE the
"/dev/sequencer".
The basic point here are that KMID and KMIDI are two entirely different
programs that work in different ways. I struggled with this for quite a
while before giving up in frustration and using KMIDI for all my midi
needs. I has "some" luck by using the Commersial OSS drivers from
4-Front Technologies, but not much.. This is probably more a tribute to
my ineptitude than anything else <g>.
Cheers,
-Don Spoon-
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