Pmidi
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The pmidi
MIDI player
Contents
What is pmidi
?
pmidi
is a program for playing MIDI files either on
internal MIDI devices like your soundcard or
external MIDI devices like MIDI
keyboards. pmidi
works with ALSA's
sequencer and has a simple command-line user interface.
Please read the general introduction to playing MIDI files on the page PlayingMIDIFiles and the short explanation of MIDI is on the page MIDI.
Where can I download pmidi
?
You can download pmidi
from
http://freshmeat.net/projects/pmidi/.
How can I use pmidi
?
To play a MIDI file with pmidi
you need to do three
things in order:
Step 1
Firstly, load a soundfont to put a set of
musical instrument sounds into your soundcard's wave memory (if
applicable) using either asfxload SF8MBGM.SBK
(native ALSA version) or
sfxload SF8MBGM.SBK
(version for ALSA's
OSSEmulation).
Step 2
Secondly, find out which MIDI ports are available using
pmidi
:
pmidi -l
which produces output similar to:
Port Client name Port name
64:0 Rawmidi 0 - Sound Blaster 16 M Sound Blaster 16 MPU-401
65:0 Emu8000 WaveTable Emu8000 Port 0
65:1 Emu8000 WaveTable Emu8000 Port 1
65:2 Emu8000 WaveTable Emu8000 Port 2
65:3 Emu8000 WaveTable Emu8000 Port 3
66:0 OPL3 FM synth OPL3 FM Port
Step 3
Thirdly, choose a port name like 64:0
(an external
MIDI device in this case) or 65:0
(the soundcard's
MIDI synth in this case) and play a MIDI
file on your chosen port:
pmidi -p 64:0 MusicFile.mid
Alternative MIDI players
There are many alternative MIDI players for Linux/ALSA listed at http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=MIDI+player&trove_cat_id=1.
Takeshi Iwai's drvmidi
MIDI player is able to move
forwards and backwards in a MIDI file while it is being
played as well as dynamically load soundfonts.
The playmidi/xplaymidi
MIDI player can adjust the
playback speed of a MIDI file while it is being played.
Look at the page PlayingMIDIFiles for several alternative ways of playing MIDI files.
Retrieved from "http://alsa.opensrc.org/Pmidi"