Wanted to mention Timidity is my favorite midi player. I had some questions and comments on it I wanted to share with the list.
First, is there a patch or a command line option or any way at all to get Karaoke midi (kar file) lyrics to stop stuttering or echoing? This is the one thing on Timidity that leaves room for improvement. Any help or suggestions on this would be greatly appreciated. Second, is the patch for the Xaw interface made by Yair K going to be added to the official Timidity source on the download page? I tried the patched version out and I loved it. It brings some of the nice parts of the Windows interface to Linux. It would be great if Timidity users could try this addition out without having to go search for the patch. I did have one problem compiling it on my system, but once that was corrected this ran beautifully. I'm running DeLi Linux and I installed the xaw3d package for the distribution. The compiler couldn't find Xaw3dP.h which doesn't appear to exist on my system. I don't see XAW3D defined anywhere in the makefiles or code, so I don't know why it's going through the #ifdef XAW3D switch and including the Xaw3dP.h file in interface/xaw.h. However, once I commented the include line out (#include XAWINCDIR(Xaw3dP.h)) on line 64, the program compiled fine. I love the piano keyboards that were added to the interface. Third, saw mention on the list about lack of legal midi files. I've seen this issue mentioned with other music projects like Ultrastar as well. I would really like to see the Open Source community step up and fill this gap. Had talked to someone at Project Gutenberg a while back about sharing popular public domain folk songs, but at the time they were only interested in classical music. There are, however, some very nice sources for public domain midi music (classical, folk, etc.). Some of these sites include: http://www.contemplator.com/folk.html http://www.pdmusic.org/ http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ http://www.cipoo.net/ Also, mudcat cafe ( http://www.mudcat.org/ ) is a great source for digging up information on what folk songs are public domain. They have some midi file examples of these songs as well. If you want to create some of your own public domain music for Timidity (like I've been doing), I have a list of web sites that host public domain music at: http://www.distasis.com/recipes/pdmuse.htm Using abc notation and the program abc2midi, I can convert public domain sheet music to midi format, ready for Timidity to play. Timidity's also great at converting these midi files into wave format for recording to CD. There are also a lot of wonderful amateur song writers out there. Hopefully more of them will start sharing their works under Open licensing. Some of their stuff is definitely better than professional material. Fourth, I wanted to give a plug to the Freepats group. They're working to provide free (as in free to use in your own music creations) soundfonts that work with Timidity and other programs. I've tried out some of their larger, specialized instrument fonts on the Windows version of Timidity. It needs a lot of memory and makes Timidity subject to crashing much easier, but it sounds wonderful (even better than my organ). If you haven't tried out some of their higher quality soundfont files with Timidity and you have the memory, it's worth checking out. The Freepats group is working on increasing the number of quality soundfonts that are available under Open licensing. So, if you have access to any public domain or Open licensed instrument samples or you know someone who does or can help create some, please share it with this group ( http://freepats.opensrc.org ). Thanks. Sincerely, Laura http://www.distasis.com/recipes/music.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. Use priority code J8TL2D2. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone _______________________________________________ Timidity-talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/timidity-talk
