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Topic: Fluidsynth / USB midi - Solved at last

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blip

Group: Members
Posts: 125
Joined: May 2007

Posted: July 11 2007,21:43

Hi everyone
Well who would have thought finally I've got sound coming out of fluidsynth via USB midi. It's taken a lot of experimentation! I'm using DSL 3.3 and a Soundblaster with an Edirol UM-1EX midi interface.

To get fluidsynth working and accepting midi input, install alsa (go to Mydsl/System and select Alsa from the menu).

. Then edit this text file by opening this in the text editor beaver as superuser

/etc/apt/sources.list

Put a hash inf#deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/ woody main contrib non-free
deb http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/debian oldstable main contrib non-free
#deb http://mirror.linux.org.au/debian oldstable main contrib non-free
#deb http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/debian oldstable main contrib non-free

Now save this in beaver.

Open the shell and type
sudo apt-get update
apt-get install fluidsynth

Type the number '8' then enter e.g. 'London' (or wherever you live)
Fluidsyth will install.

To get sound coming out get a soundfont ( mine is called sf.sf2) and type this

fluidsynth -m oss -a alsa s.sf2

and hey presto

I wonder why when you type
fluidsynth -m alsa_seq -a alsa s.sf2
fluidsynth -m alsa -a alsa s.sf2

nothing works. Why does the first one work ( i.e. -m oss which means use oss midi ) when the alsa one will not work? When you try the alsa one it just says 'failed to create midi thread no midi input' or something to that effect. Why is USB midi working over OSS? I'm not bothered so long as it works anyway but this is just to understand what is going on.

For newbies: if you open Emelfm as superuser and go to usr/bin/alsamixer - right clck over the file alsamixer and select 'Execute in Xterm' for the mixer to come up ( so you can at least put the levels of the mixer up).

Also you can open the program XMMS Audio/Mpeg and then go to Preferences and select 'Alsa' as the audio driver ( it was on OSS) - just so you can test that alsa works ok.

There are so many red herrings at times you have to be careful not to get into a muddle when testing things.

Now my last thing is to get Muse working with Alsa using Fluidsynth. Anyone care to have a go and help me out?

Thanks for all your help everyone ....it's so satisfying to play piano now

blip

Group: Members
Posts: 125
Joined: May 2007

Posted: July 11 2007,21:44

Sorry just to clarify the above post - open the sources.list and make sure it looks like this before you try to grab fluidsynth from the repository:

#deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/ woody main contrib non-free
deb http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/debian oldstable main contrib non-free
#deb http://mirror.linux.org.au/debian oldstable main contrib non-free
#deb http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/debian oldstable main contrib non-free

Juanito

Group: Members
Posts: 1601
Joined: Sep. 2005

Posted: July 12 2007,03:33

Well done... For your how-to above, did loading alsa automatically load the snd-usb-audio driver or did you have to do that manually?

blip

Group: Members
Posts: 125
Joined: May 2007

Posted: July 12 2007,08:19

I will double check this tonight - at the moment I am typing modprobe snd-usb-audio at the start... I will let everyone know if this needs to be typed.

What would be great is if I could get fluidsynth to start up with a script i.e.

fluidsynth -m oss -a alsa soundfont.sf2
with the modprobe snd-usb-audio command....like autoexec.bat in windows...is there a way in Linux of doing this easily please?

Juanito

Group: Members
Posts: 1601
Joined: Sep. 2005

Posted: July 12 2007,08:36

Sure, you can add it to the /opt/bootlocal.sh script or call a separate script from within bootlocal.sh

If you go with the second option, you will need to remember to add your script to .filetool.list and also to make it executable (right-click menu in emelFM).

4 replies since July 11 2007,21:43

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Damn Small Linux Board » Damn Small Linux » Multimedia » Fluidsynth / USB midi - Solved at last