Issues Installing Timidity Plugin for XMMS (FC5)

AviJacobson · 10-05-2006, 12:37 PM

I'm posting this because exhaustive searches produced no clues at all while I was struggling with this issue, and now that I have solved it I'd like to make it easier for the next user who runs into the problem.

My laptop has an integrated midi synthesizer/sequencer device that works on Windows but not on Linux. So I use timidity++. After installing timidity++, I could listen to midis using Rosegarden, or from the timidity command line (if I ran ems from the command line first, another annoyance). I could also use kmidi (which I believe has its own software sequencer and doesn't use timidity++'s, but I'm not sure). I could use my music composition and notation software (Noteworthy Composer) under Wine/Crossover, and it played midi output just fine.

But I could not manage to install the timidity plugin for XMMS, so I couldn't play midis through my audio player.

I configured, compiled and installed the libtimidity package without errors (it doesn't exist as an RPM so I compiled from source), but when I went to ./configure the xmms-timidity plugin, I got an error saying that libtimidity is not installed:

configure:19271: error: *** libTiMidity not installed - please install first ***

Solutions that did not work:

I noted that libtimidity had been installed in /usr/local/lib. So I tried adding that directory to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable (as root):

# LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib
# export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
# ldconfig

But still no good.

I noticed that configure had looked for the other packages in /usr/bin, so I copied symlinks for libtimidity to that directory, but still no good.

Here's what worked:

I posted the problem on the Craigslist Linux forum, and a helpful user suggested I look in the libtimidity distribution for a .pc file and see where it was installed. He guessed it would be in /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig, and he was right. He suggested that maybe pkg-config was not looking in that directory by default, and that I add that directory to PKG_CONFIG_PATH.

Sure enough,

# echo $PKG_CONFIG_PATH

returned a blank line -- there was no such environment variable at all.

I defined it by running

# PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/pkgconfig
# export PKG_CONFIG_PATH
# ldconfig [not sure I needed to do this one]

Then everything went smoothly:

# ./configure [no errors]
# make [no errors]
# make install [no errors]

And I'm now listening to a midi file through XMMS.

fozner · 10-07-2006, 01:34 AM

Timidity++ can also run in daemon mode (man timidity). In this mode, it can act as a hardware (emulated through software) MIDI device (selectable through kcontrol or in your applications).

I have installed the following in rc.local:

Code:

# MIDI Synth
esd &
killall -9 esd &
timidity -iA -B2,8 -Os -EFreverb=0 &

The parts about esd are a workaround for Fedora 5. On Fedora 5 esd is already running but Timidity won't see it until you load it again and kill it. Go figure on that a while...

With Timidity installed as a software synth daemon and selected through the control applet, kmid and friends will happily play midi files as well.