[linux-audio-user] rosegarden/timidity nigthtmare in linux 2.6

[tim hall]

On Monday 15 March 2004 4:51 pm, jeffrey milton wrote:
> It started out simple enough... all I wanted to do was have rosegarden play
> a midi file :(  But it does not, can not, will not.  The more I look into
> it, the more obtuise everything becomes.  Can anyone shed any light on
> these
> mysteries?

Does it not play the file, or are you simply not getting any sound output?

> I test the midi
>
> $ timidity /a-train.mid
>
> Sounds great!

OK, so your basic sound set up works, Good.

> MYSTERY #1:  How does timidity know what port to use and what
> instruments to
> use?  I never told it what bank, etc.

I guess you were lucky ;-)


> MYSTERY #4: What is the significance is General MIDI Synth #10[D] ? I
> alwasy
> see teh [D] at slot 10.  What does [D] mean?

Probably that It's a drum track rather than a synth track.

>
> When I play, I hear nothing!
>
> The only thing I see that has changed is that rosegardensequencer has
> started jack...
>
> /usr/bin/jackd -T -d alsa -d hw:0 -p 2048
>
> which is bad because jack, so far, has only succeeded in preventing any
> sound to work in any manner.  I just want rosegarden to work with midi as I
> have given uip on jack after about 70 hours of frustration with jack.  I'll
> get back to jack when I have a few months of free time.

Ah, AFAIK, if you want to get MIDI driven sound out of Rosegarden4, you have 
to use a softsynth via Jackd. Use Qjackctl to start Jackd, then start up the 
softsynth you want to use and then Rosegarden. It won't take months to 
figure, I know it can seem daunting at first, but you really are going to 
want it working from the sounds of things.

> However, when I quit rosegarden, I hear a single note play!!

Are you sure that's not just a system beep?

> Appearantly, my timidity port has been fubared by rosegarden (or something)

No, I doubt it. If you're using ALSA, only one application can have access to 
any device. It's just in use - the port still works & is still recognisable I 
think you'll find :-)

> Other mysteries...
>
> MYSTERY: Port 64 is 'Intel 82801DB-ICH4 MIDI - Rawmidi 0' [type=kernel]
> How do I load sounds into this external midi?  When I run rosegarden it
> shows that there are banks of instruments available but no sound comes out
> when I play "aplaymidi -p 64:0 /Blew.mid"

You can't, it's not a SoundBlaster. You need to use something like fluidsynth.

> MYSTERY:  Some midifiles, when loaded into rosegarden have "Imported MIDI"
> in channel 1, but nothing there, and things like 'Rhythm' assigned to MIDI
> external device #10[D]"  (there's that 10[D] again). n In this example, the
> file that have this information do not play with aplaymidi

This is normal no? - channel 1 contains the original MIDI info or something 
like that. It's normal to assign the Rhythm track to #10, It's a handy 
convention, why it should be an external device, I don't know,  I can't see 
from here :-)

HTH a bit

tim hall