[F8]: Getting MIDI player to work: HOW?

[Dan Thurman]

On Wednesday 11 June 2008 12:58:37 am Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:22:02 -0400, Ric Moore wrote:
> > Native midi play, to me, it one of the Dark Arts solvable using timidity
> > instead. It's saved me a ton of grief. Do you have the timidity-patches
> > file installed?? That one is about 9 megs of sound fonts and there is
> > another one that I can't remember the name of that's a lot bigger. But,
> > you gotta have the sound fonts in order for it to tootle anything. I
> > hope this helps and someone volunteers the name of the rpm for the huge
> > soundfonts. Ah! Found it in my updates directory:
> >
> > PersonalCopy-Lite-soundfont-4.1-3.fc7.noarch.rpm
> >
> > Why the heck timidity isn't in the name of this file is kinda strange. A
> > grep on "timidity" would never find it. It's almost 15 megs worth! Lotsa
> > sound fonts in that one! I hope whoever maintains this package inserts
> > "timidity" somewhere in the file name. Ric
>
> Why? The package from personalcopy.com is independent of timidity. It's a
> different project. And there's a dependency in place already. At least
> in F8:
>   $ rpm -qR timidity++|grep Per
>   PersonalCopy-Lite-soundfont 
> To tell users that they need to learn application names like "timidity" is
> strange. Fortunately, "yum install \*midi\*" would work here. ;)

Well... not for me.  I fundamental problem is that everything I have tried so 
far does not get midi to work with pulseaudio.  Heck, giving up, I tried 
suggestions in:

http://www.legg.uklinux.net/rosegarden_sound_howto_fc7.html

Killed pulseaudio daemon (as suggested)

And I was able to get Jack, QSynth, and RoseGarden to run - but with
no sound. HOWEVER - as luck will have it, Jack/QSynth does create
an input device from which I can select it via kmid as "FLUID SYNTH (8510)
Synth input port (8510:0) - ALSA device" and can run a midi file with
sound - but it is choppy, probably due to the jack server/qsynth processes.  
There is probably some tweaking to do in Jack/QSynth to get things sounding 
better, dunno.

What I find, is that I cannot locate this device in RoseGarden.  Now, as far 
as playing other sound files such as mp3, whatever, the sounds are very 
noisy, static, choppy, the same with midi, probably due to Jack/Qsynth setup 
and pulseaudio excels. I am not an expert here - just reporting my 
observation as a "newbie".

The whole point of this exercise , is that I can get Midi to run albeit, 
crappy sounding, so why is it that PulseAudio cannot even do that much - I 
haven't found any place where I can setup MIDI under PulseAudio.

Any advice, please?
Dan