Re: MIDI questions
On Sunday 24 Oct 2004 01:03, Marc Shapiro wrote:
> I am trying to play MIDI files on my Debian box. I have installed
> playmidi, but can not get it to work. It gives me the following
> error:
>
> mns@xander:~/daisy$ playmidi FirstNoel.mid
> Playmidi 2.4 Copyright (C) 1994-1997 Nathan I. Laredo, AWE32 by
> Takashi IwaiThis is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
> For details please see the file COPYING.
> open /dev/sequencer: No such device
>
> but, when I take a look in /dev, I see:
>
> crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 1 Jul 12 23:08 sequencer
>
> I am in the audio group, so it does not seem to be a permissions
> thing. Is there something else that I am missing?
>
> Also, is there a package that will allow me to convert a MIDI file
> to .wav format so that I can burn it to CD with XCDRoast?
>
> Marc
I sympathise deeply, having had endless troubles with MIDI myself.
As far as I can tell, your problem is that you need to be running
something like TiMidity++ as a midi server for ALSA.
This command works for me when run as root:
[~]# timidity --realtime-priority=40 -iA -B10,10 -Os
I find that's adequate to make KMid, Rosegarden and NoteEdit work
reasonably well. (of course you have to have TiMidity++ installed.)
Higher settings for realtime priority have caused all kinds of trouble
for me, but it may depend on how much memory you have (I have only
128MB).
TiMidity++ will also convert your .mid files to .wav or .ogg. The man
page gives details of the necessary command line options.
I also recommend getting better patch files than the incomplete
freepat set that comes with Debian. The legendary EAW patches are
still available in far-flung corners of the Internet: I downloaded
a .deb from a Russian site a few days ago. As far as I can tell,
there's some doubt about the licence that makes them unsuitable for
Debian, but they're apparently in the public domain.
--
PJR :-)
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