Baslinux mailing list

[Ron Clarke <ariadne AT acepia.net.au>]

Hi Sindi,

On Tue, 27 Jan 2004 17:46:16 -0500 (EST)
Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com> wrote:

> > > This looks like a GUI program since is it about 10M if I recall 
> > > correctly. 
> > 
> >    No.  Timidity is CLI.  There are some graphic front-ends for Timidity 
> > in X, but you don't need those to play/hear MIDIs. But you will need the 
> > patches.
> 
> The one availabe for Debian was 10M. 

    No. Timidity that I have is 146 kb as a tgz file.

> What is a patch?

    A patch is a *.pat file that tells the MIDI player what each instrument 
should sound like.

> What are patches and where do I get them?

  Start at:
     http://www.startdate.bc.ca/eawpatches/html/get_patches.htm

   These are the best patches I have found, but the omnibus file is over 22 
MB, so use WGET.

> splay - buffer size of file device is wrong
> bplay - inappropriate ioctl for device
> abcmidi - converts between abc and midi format - what is abc?

   abc is a format from the early days used to encode, send, and decode music.
There are abc players for DOS and even Win3.1.  My own DOS "speaker-player" 
uses
a similar system to make music by "beeps" from the PC speaker, at:
      http://tadpole.mytunebook.de/tunes/tadpole/fordos.htm

   It is still used as a quick, tiny, means to pass music via the 
internet/email,
and is much in favour by whistle-players, for instance.

 
> I played a cd by pushing the play button.  The card sounds okay,
> better than with cat.

    Then workbone should also work.

> 
> Do I need to mount the cd-rom drive somehow for playmidi?

   No.  And you don't need to mount the CD-ROM for wokbone if it has an audio 
CD in it.

Regards,
         Ron


-- 
Ron Clarke 
AUSREG Consultancy      http://www.valylink.net.au/~ausreg/index.html
Tadpole Tunes           http://tadpole.mytunebook.de/
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