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[Christian Brandt <brandtc AT psi5.com>]

Samual Acorn schrieb:
> as promised; some recordings of FM synth the way it was -supposed- to
> be done... in these tunes each voice of the OPL chips are controlled
> directly... stereo/echo/reverb/polyphony and even the instrument
> parameters themselves are all done manually... nothing is preset...

 I can't actually help you but I can come up with a good explanaition.

 OPL-Output through Midi isn't a define standard. It is mostly the 
driver which decides how OPL-Midi sounds, just like a good soundbank 
makes a softsyntheziser sound good.

 Windows has top-of-the-notch OPL-drivers. The Linux-OPL-drivers pretty 
much suck big time. And even that is a simplification of the real problems:

 The Kernel only offers an interface towards the raw ports of the 
OPL-chip but still knows nothing about "instruments"-level. So it is all 
up to playmidi and playmidi sucks at OPL-instruments. But there are no 
alternatives. Most/All other Midi-Player simply copy&pasted the 
OPL-routines (kaffeine, that gnome-player, mplayer etcpp) with the same 
mediocre results.

 I have never been able to make OPL sound good under Linux. So I went 
with soundbanks which I played through timidity or loaded them into my 
soundblaster-soundbanks or just used plaing GM-boards.

 If you happen to find a good OPL-player for Linux let me know, I am 
always into strange audio-systems though I mostly use them through a 
tracker-like-interface and not a MIDI-like.

Christian Brandt