Playing MIDIfiles under Linux

[Tony Baechler]

Hi,

Thanks for filing the bug against Timidity.  It looks good.  Debian 
doesn't have the Fluid soundfont yet.  Also, I looked at the url in the 
"copyright" file that ships with Fluid and saw that there is a release 
3.1 which seems newer than the Ubuntu package.  I installed it but 
couldn't hear an obvious difference.

I'm having a problem with Timidity and drums.  I can hear that there are 
drums but they're very quiet.  I tried changing soundfonts but that 
didn't help.  I know about the -A switch to amplify, but all that did is 
cause distortion and I still could hardly hear any drums.  I've played 
the same files on several other computers and sequencers and could hear 
the drums loud and clear.  I tried reading the man pages but frankly I 
found them very confusing.  Is there a way to tell Timidity to use a 
different soundfont for drums or somehow to just amplify the drum 
parts?  I tried "-A800A" on the cmd line and as I said, I still hardly 
heard them and it was too loud.

While I'm here, are there any accessible Curses sequencers?  I know that 
I could do various package searches but it's hard to know if one 
actually works until it's downloaded and installed.  I am not a musician 
and only have an old SB Live! card in this computer, but it would be 
nice to adjust tempo, instruments, and key.  I know Timidity does some 
of those things but has no way to save the new file.  I looked at the 
help several times for the Timidity Curses interface and I couldn't 
figure it out.  I don't want a GUI program right now because Orca isn't 
installed yet.  I am using grml with Speakup, 256 MB of RAM and a 1.70 
GHZ processor.  If there is nothing with a Curses interface, I would use 
a GUI program once I get it up and working.  Thanks for any ideas you 
might have.