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One side of Linux I have never played with was the
Midi tools. I thought that this would be fun, so when a purchased a new sound
card, I took care to find it was supported by Alsa for Midi.
The card I choose was an Abit AU10 - it also
supported 5.1 surround sound and went nicely with my Abit motherboard and Abit
graphics card.
After two weeks of trying to get it working I am
having a rest, but for those in a similar position here are the things I have
learned and I hope that you can take it further:
* Just because a card says Midi, don't expect it to
play Midi without external hardware. Midi refers to the serial connector to the
card and an MPU401 type processor. To play Midi you also need a synthesiser of
some sort.
* Just because your card has an FM synthesizer
don't expect it to be able to synthesize Midi notes. I think that maybe this can
be done on some cards, but not the FM801.
* With the AU10 and Alsa 0.9beta10 you get an OPL3
FM device lisited by pmidi -l, but it does not seem to be able to play anything.
I tried using sbiload with the command:
sbiload -p65:0 --opl3 /etc/midi/std.o3
/etc/midi/drums.o3
but still silence. I think maybe this is to do with
no soundfonts being loaded - I will post again when I find out
more.
* You cannot compile Alsa easily under Suse Linux
7.2. Even if you install the kernel sources this doesn't generate the
version.h file needed. To do that you need to "make dep", which means
configuring the kernel for a huge number of parameters that you most likely have
no idea about. Suse actually have a neat utility in Yast which sets some
standard configurations.
* Even if you have all the sources and have
generated a version.h file, it still won't compile properly. This time it
is complaining about aclocal (I think).
* If you are a Suse user, the best bet is to get
the pre-compiled binaries from ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/tiwai/ these
will install okay.
* Once you have installed the new binaries, don't
expect XMMS to work anymore with digital output - analog is okay and at least
with the 0.9beta the rear speakers can be turned on. I don't tend to use the
visualisations so analog is fine and the sound quality better. Also don't expect
to see Midi devices anymore in KDE Control Center.
* The Timidity program on ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/tiwai/ will
work fine with Alsa and you can use KMid nicely. I actually think that the sound
quality from the version shipped with Suse 7.2 is better than the latest
betas, but this may be subjective.
* Vkeybd works well (only a limited number of
voices are available).
* KMidi crashes complaining about Piano+Guitar. I
think that this is unrelated - again more investigation required.
* Finally Alsa is a wonderful piece of software
that has the potential to greatly enhance the multimedia capabilities of Linux
PCs.
I will soon continue - my aims are as
follows:
1. Good quality sound in analog and digital modes
from XMMS (look for patches on XMMS's site) on all six speakers (currently
4).
2. Plenty of noise when opening and closing windows
etc. in KDE and XFCE.
3. KMidi, KMid, Vkeybd, VK707, Trommler,
Spiralsynth, RTSynth, Jazz and Noteedit all working correctly.
4. Xine playing DVDs with surround
sound.
5. Transferring vinyl records to CD with
X-CDRoast.
Any hints or tips are more than welcome -
all the best......
Mike
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