midi issues with the cs4236 soundcard

nymusicman · 11-05-2006, 11:35 PM

I've looked at similar threads to this title and have found junk. I'm pretty new at setting up a soundcard somewhat manually to just sending a link to a site that tells me nothing is not going to help. In every other forum where this question was supposed to be answered it was blown off with something like buy a new soundcard or upgrade/downgrade alsa which in my opinion is a pretty bad answer. Let's hope someone out there can give a real knowlegdable answer on this situation. Okay now that that is out of the way let's begin.

I have a Dell with a cs-4236 soundcard. A couple of years ago I was running Mandrake 10.1 and sndconfig found this card perfectly. Everything worked midi mp3 wav ... and the list goes on. Since then I wanted to delve a little more into linux so I moved on to Slackware 10.2 with the 2.4.31 kernel. I use alsaconf and it detects my sound card wonderfully with one exception. NO MIDI!!! I figure it's just the 2.4 Kernel series I leave it alone and do my midi work in Windows using Finale. However I've always wanted to really delve into rosegarden. So recently I've upgraded my kernel to 2.6.18 and still NO MIDI!!! Please help!!!

nymusicman · 11-12-2006, 01:14 PM

Is nobody brave or wise enough to take on this challenge? Did I ask to rudely? Does it sound like I'm not willing to put in the work?

The only reason I said what I've said is that I've tried all these suggestions and none of them work. But something has to work in Slack if it worked in Mandrake. It's all linux. They all use alsa. What is going on here?

fresno · 02-10-2007, 03:53 AM

Hello:

I know this is an old post, but since I believe that free software is also meant for old machines, I thought of sending an answer here.

I have the same hardware that you have, and ran into the same problem. My os is a pclinuxos flavor, called SeLiCES linux ( http://www.iesjorgemanrique.com:85/s...res/index.html )

My problem was that the snd-seq-midi kernel module was not being loaded. This I fixed by adding the following line into /etc/modprobe.d/sound:

Code:

alias midi snd-seq-midi

Afterwards, my init.d scripts ran succesfully. There's one more warning though: It seems that the alsa player doesn't have many instruments, and when I try aplaymidi it may stay silenced for most of the song. This won't happen with other players like playmidi.

Hope this helps. Better late than never!

Greetings from Europe

nymusicman · 02-10-2007, 09:37 PM

Thank you so much I've just added the line I'll restart and let you know what's going on later. Would you be able to post your modprobe.d/sound file for comparison with mine. Thank you.

fresno · 02-11-2007, 03:08 AM

Sure, that's a good idea. Here are the contents of my modprobe.d/sound:

Code:

alias snd-card-0 snd-cs4236
alias sound-slot-0 snd-cs4236
# línea original.
options snd-cs4236 port=0x530 cport=0x538 isapnp=0 dma1=1 dma2=0 irq=5
# añadido también.
alias midi snd-seq-midi

And those are modules I got loaded, as displayed by lsmod:
snd_seq_oss,snd_seq,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_cs4236,
snd_opl3_lib,snd_hwdep,snd_cs4236_lib,snd_mpu401_uart,
snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device,snd_cs4231_lib,snd_pcm,
snd_timer
I think that some are only for oss compatibility.

cheers!