Hi,
can someone here Please help, Iv'e been trying to get midi files to play now for months. Im running Slackware 12 and my sound card is a VIA 8235 onboard card.

Iv'e downloaded rosegarden Timidity and made sure to start Jack using

"/usr/bin/qjackctl -s"

the weird thing is they play with timidity but the sound quality sucks. It's like someone playing on a kids toy organ.

I have tonnes of backing tracks and stuff in midi format and i'd really like to be able to listen to them.

can anyone help??

thanks in advance

The Yikes

Many modern built-in audio cards do not have midi functionality. (Even if your motherboard have it, most likely, quality will be very poor.)
If you want better sound, you'll need download instruments for timidity.
Either freepats or eawpats. This will make tracks sound better.
Eawpats IMO is better, but it is free only for non-commercial purpose. Freepats is truly GPL (AFAIK), but some instruments are missing (quite a lot of instruments). Eawpats can be found somewhere using google. I have both eawpats and freepats, but I don't remember where I've got eawpats. Also, I think timidity should be running as daemon in alsa sequencer mode.