Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

Ron Clarke wrote:
> > Are there any _good_ collections of patches that can easily be used
> > with your timidity binary?
>
>     Yes there are.  The best free collection I have found goes under the
> name "eawpats", but the URL I have for this is no longer to be found. It was
> about 23 MB. It was a compendium of several collections. There are others of
> varying quality.

I downloaded the eawpats.zip. You are right, these patches do work
with your timidity. I only had to unzip eawpats and edit the
timidity.cfg. Then I moved the patches to the
/usr/local/share/timidity directory (where the old patches were) and
now timidity uses these patches.

I agree with you; these patches sound better than any other free
collection. The acoustic grand piano patch sounds great - it could
pass for a recording of a real piano performance with the right MIDI
file. But the strings/violins sound almost as bad as an OPL3; in other
words, not good.

>     But I understand that the really, REALLY good ones are very expensive -
> there is mention of thousands of dollars for sets that are used by the
> recording industry. (Yes, folks ! Those commercial CDs that you enjoy may be
> orchestrated, in part, by MIDI tracks !)

Or MODs. I think that there's also some kind of tracker-style software
for Mac that professional musicians use.

Thanks for the link, Ron. I found it very useful.

David