Dave Robillard wrote:
On Wed, 2007-22-08 at 13:22 +0100, Simon Williams wrote:
I'm now at the point where I can play midi files, and I have a midi
keyboard connected and can play sounds to and from that.
Timidity is rubbish, frankly, so I'm using fluidsynth, which works fine.
However, for some reason I can't get qsynth to work.
Qsynth1: Failed to create the MIDI driver (alsa_seq). No MIDI input will
be available.
No matter what settings I try, it always fails. The only useful message
I ever got was for alsa_raw, when it said that the device didn't exist.
For some reason I have /dev/snd/midiC1D0, but not /dev/snd/midiC0D0. So
I temporarily symlinked them, but that didn't help- it wasn't
complaining about a missing device any more, but it still couldn't
create the midi driver and still wouldn't tell me why not.
Also, both fluidsynth and timidity are too slow. Midi events are routed
around instantly (tested with vkeybd and the keyboard I have plugged
in), but there is a delay in playing anything sent to fluidsynth or
timidity- about half a second or so.
Use a smaller (audio) buffer size.
Adding the '-a jack' option to fluidsynth fixed it. I also added '-r
48000' to get the periods to match which probably helped.
Now that I know I can play midi in realtime, how do I start doing
interesting things with it? Sure I've got fluidsynth, but my current
keyboard only has 8 instrument buttons, and fluidsynth isn't much good
for changing the instrument on the fly.
So far I have 2 options:
1. Use the selectors on my keyboard to get whatever the first 8
instruments are in my soundfont.
2. Use another program to pick the instrument- but so far I haven't
found anything that will let me pick a selection of instruments- I can
only pick one and then the selectors on my keyboard don't do anything.
Also, I would love to be able to mix together two or more instruments-
and be able to specify the range, volume and fading of each one.
As an example, so that I could have something like:
1. Piano sound- for everything except the last octave
2. Bass guitar- Mainly on lower half of the keyboard, fades out towards
the middle
3. Flute or something- just on the last octave
Also, when I get my hands on a decent midi controller keyboard I want to
be able to use the extra buttons, knobs and sliders to control the
mixing above, and things like auto drum accompaniment and other synth
effects, but as yet I haven't seen any software which will let me do this.
Any suggestions?
Thanks
Simon
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