Often enough it happens that I have to play some midi-files. Unfortunately, my Fedora system never was and still is not ready for midi out of the box. This might partially be due to the fact that I have a on-board soundcard with no own wave table synthesizer.
Anyway, one way to solve the problem is to use timidity++ as a an ALSA midi synthesizer. This can be done with the command:
timidity -iA
Timidity now runs in the background as a “midi sound daemon”. Afterwards, start your midi program (like kmid) and choose the new ALSA timidity devices as output. Everything should work now.
/home/liquidat 
I recently found some old NES midi files and I found that timidity allows you to convert them to ogg files.
timidity -Ov1S *.midWhich makes them easier to listen to later.
I must admit I like the idea of midi a lot better than the idea of ogg.
Ogg is the sound, but midi is the source file. I just we had a more robust and flexible midi-like format and handling system, you know, for multiple track + midi files to be composed by one’s system in real time at any desired sampling rate.
Performance hit? Sure. I’ll take it anyway.
Maybe what I want is a rosegarden player and music repository.. any thoughts?
ethana2@gmail.com
Scoot, I originally wanted to include that flag as well, but had to realize that the Fedora version of timidity is not compiled with Ogg output support – I have no idea why.
ethana2, midi and Ogg are two totally different things, so its even hard to compare them. But in case you are looking for a midi repository: Wikipedia has many songs.
Tried out your tip today, but at least when playing back with aplaymidi the timing got a little screwy, while timitdity -Os playing the file directly sounded much better. Dunno if that’s the fault of aplaymidi or something else though.