playing midi files

Forum thread started by farvardin on Sat, 2009-09-19 22:05

Hello,

I'm running Haiku on real hardware. I can't play midi files with the midi player. I can drop file on the app, nothing is running. My soundcard is a common integrated AC97 card.

Is the midi player supposed to work in this case?

Comments

Re: playing midi files

by humdinger - 2009-09-20 09:01

I just tried it from Terminal and got this output:

MidiPlayer /boot/home/Desktop/bor_ps3.mid
[midi] UNIMPLEMENTED status_t BPrivate::BSoftSynth::LoadInstrument(int16)
fluidsynth: error: Unable to open file "/boot/system/data/synth/big_synth.sy"
fluidsynth: error: Couldn't load soundfont file
fluidsynth: error: Failed to load SoundFont "/boot/system/data/synth/big_synth.sy"
error in fluid_synth_sfload

Looks like Haiku doesn't provide a soundfont. I'll file a bugreport.
Thanks.

Regards,
Humdinger

Re: playing midi files

by Bruno Brocoli - 2009-09-20 09:20

I think there is no midi support right now...

It works, but there is no sound font installed, you should download from internet your prefered one, and install as "/boot/system/data/synth/big_synth.sy", symlinks are valid too. I even played a usb midi keyboard in haiku, but usb_midi is not complete yet. No idea about classic midi ports, but should work too.

Re: playing midi files

by kvdman - 2009-09-20 16:51

A bug report for this was filed two years ago.

http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/1357

No idea why it hasn't been fixed, takes two seconds to download and put a soundfont in the correct directory; perhaps there are license problems, need an MIT licensed sound font?

Re: playing midi files

by kvdman - 2009-09-20 17:05

Apparently this sound font is MIT based:

http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/f/fluid-soundfont/

I'll add it to the ticket Humdinger created.

Re: playing midi files

by humdinger - 2009-09-20 18:13

And it's confirmed to work. :)
Nice. Though 140mb... that's BTW the reason it's not included in the image by default.

Now... Anyone got some URLs for downloading good MIDI files?

Regards,
Humdinger

Re: playing midi files

by farvardin - 2009-09-20 21:10

well, thank you very much. I didn't think to start it from terminal.

So it's using fluid synth...

If you wish to use midi, then do this:

cd /boot/system/data/synth
wget http://ocmnet.com/saxguru/TimGM6mb.sf2
ln -s TimGM6mb.sf2 big_synth.sy

This TimGM6mb.sf2 is really small (6 mb) and sounds very good, I'm using it with timidity on Linux:
http://ocmnet.com/saxguru/Timidity.htm

I don't know which license it has, but it'd be nice to include it in Haiku, if possible. It may worth to contact the author of this website about it.

Yet I have the same issue with midi than I had with playing ogg or mp3, but it's another problem...