1237e174aeaa
tech



Hello Wayne - 

Being the Christmas season, and one of the few holidays with a
focus on music, I've been listening to a great deal of music
lately. Much of it in the MIDI format. I've even 'improved' a
few that I had worked on last year and doubled the number of
titles on my Christmas MIDI music page. 

I've done some reading about Linux apps and MIDI music files
and what I've read so far is a bit of a disappointment. :-\ 

As I suspected the 'playmidi' included with KNOPPIX is intended
to only use the FM synthesizer (sounds like a child's toy on
batteries) and not the soundfonts I am using when in Windows. 

I even downloaded and installed an older Adobe v4 Acrobat
Reader to read the Sound Blaster AWE64 user documentation only
available in PDF format. Argh! I hate PDF files. 

I'm finding more references to WinGroove, a W31 MIDI player,
than references to TIMIDITY a native Linux MIDI player that
_does_ use GUS patch soundfont files. I have WinGroove here
installed on my DOS/W31 machine and it is surprisingly good for
such a small program and small soundfont file. I use the newer
soundfonts intended for the W9x verison of WinGroove. :-) 

I have the Windows verion of TIMIDITY and the DOS version that
uses 'cspline' (whatever that is) with the EAW GUS patch files
set of 30 meg of soundfonts and used them to produce 80% of my
christmas recorded music WAV files prior to conversion to MP3,
WMA, and RA streaming audio. The EAW GUS patch files are
comparable to a full set of ROLAND soundfonts (not freeware).
There _are_ smaller 'sets' for TIMIDITY of 5, 8, and 12 megs. I
consider TIMIDITY to be at the _top_ of the list of all of the
MIDI players I have used to date. Disappointing that Linux
users aren't being made aware of it's existence more often than
what I'm seeing now. 

From what I'm reading at this point, I can see why few Linux
users get involved in MIDI music files. The 'setup' seems to be
primarilly manual configuration for most Linux apps and there
are 'dependencies' that require other drivers with no links
where to find these drivers. When reading about these Linux
apps they make it seem that you must have a midi-card to use
them. Few make it clear that a normal sound card is sufficient. 

TIMIDITY has been written and maintained by Japanese
programmers (primarily) and many, if not most, webpages for
TIMIDITY are in Japanese. Not an easy thing to deal with (for
me). Fortunately for me I have had earlier contacts with Eric
Walsh who put together the largest collection of GUS patch
files for TIMIDITY and can probably get some assistance from
him to get TIMIDITY working under Linux here on one of my
machines. :-) 

For those who care, there are links to WinGroove, TIMIDITY (for
DOS, Windows, and Linux), and other MIDI software at: 

http://www.undercoverdesign.com/dosghost/dos/w31_midi.htm

>
>        ,                          ,
>      o/      Charles.Angelich      \o       ,
>       __o/
>     / >          USA, MI           < \   __\__
 

--- * ATP/16bit 2.31 * 
... DOS the Ghost in the Machine! http://www.undercoverdesign.com/dosghost/