Quest for MIDI

amnesty_puppy · 08-17-2006, 10:19 AM

Hello,

I'm trying to get MIDI working. I have Gentoo, with gentoo kernel 2.6, alsa, ens1371 soundcard.

lsmod

Code:

Module                  Size  Used by
radeon                100064  2 
drm                    62808  3 radeon
snd_mpu401_uart         5440  0 
snd_seq_midi            5664  0 
snd_ens1371            18912  2 
snd_ac97_codec         78560  1 snd_ens1371
snd_ac97_bus            1792  1 snd_ac97_codec
snd_ens1370            13792  0 
snd_rawmidi            17312  4 snd_mpu401_uart,snd_seq_midi,snd_ens1371,snd_ens1370
snd_ak4531_codec        6912  1 snd_ens1370
analog                  8480  0 
gameport                9864  3 snd_ens1371,snd_ens1370,analog
joydev                  7040  0

I have snd_mpu401 compiled aswell but can't load it:

Code:

$ modprobe snd_mpu401
FATAL: Error inserting snd_mpu401 (/lib/modules/2.6.17-gentoo-r5/kernel/sound/drivers/mpu401/snd-mpu401.ko):No such device

Using rosegarden to hit some midi notes, the output shows up but can't hear any sound. Checking alsa settings there's no volume for the midi device.

Trying playmidi on a file gives "open /dev/sequencer: No such device."

Any midi guides are somewhat out of date but I've followed as closely as possible the setup and tried anything I can think of. I'd like to give this a good go before turning to timidity, if anyone has any idea about this?

Thanks, Dom.

zeph7r · 08-19-2006, 06:55 AM

I'm not an expert on the matter, but I got my midi sound working somehow.
I use opensuse 10.1 and in my case (I have a sound blaster live! player 5.1) midi files don't output any sound in the speakers unless you load a soundfont. Now, my system is configured to get that soundfont at /usr/share/sfbank/creative/default.sf2 but if you don't want to mess with that all you have to do is run "asfxload you_sound_font.sf2" -- I suggest you load a General Midi soundfount first if you'r not sure about the results; later on you can try loading especific soundfonts. Anyway I think this will only work if your card is AWE32 compliant (since I couldn't recognise yours from the description you provided).

Hope this helps.

greets,
--zePh7r

amnesty_puppy · 08-20-2006, 11:21 PM

Ah that's one thing I forgot - I tried asfxload for loading sounding fonts and I get "No Emux synth hwdep device is found". I'm pretty sure i have awe32 but looking around I can't find any evidence that I have an "Emux synth", I tried the emu10k1 kernel module but I don't think that worked either.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've given up to timidity now and it works perfectly so no problem.