Getting midi playback working

[Nick Payne]

I have 2.0.16 installed on Linux Mint 17 amd64. I can play lilypond-generated midi files ok with vlc and vlc-plugin-fluidsynth, but when I play one of these midi files in Frescobaldi, the file appears to play but nothing is audible. libportmidi0 and phthon-pypm are installed. When I look at midi setting in Frescobaldi preferences, both player output and input port are set to midi through port-0, and that's the only option available in the dropdown box for both input and output.

Any suggestions on what troubleshooting I can do to get the internal midi player working?

[Richard Cognot]

Hi,

Nick Payne a écrit :

I guess this should be put into the FAQ, if it is not there already...

Frescobaldi itself does not embbed a midi synth, it interfaces to a
running one. The fact you have only midi-through port 0 available shows
you' re not running one.

Try starting fluidsynth in daemon mode. Refreshing the midi ports in
frescobaldi will then show you its active midi ports, which are the ones
you should use for midi playback. You can start fluidsynth manually, or
use a user interface wrapper like QSynth which will give you easier
control over the fluidsynth startup parameters.

Regards,
Richard.
> --
> Frescobaldi homepage: http://www.frescobaldi.org/
> Mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/frescobaldi
> Issue tracker: https://github.com/wbsoft/frescobaldi/issues

[Federico Bruni]

2014-08-31 14:10 GMT+02:00 Richard Cognot <cog...@gocad.org>:

Frescobaldi itself does not embbed a midi synth, it interfaces to a running one. The fact you have only midi-through port 0 available shows you' re not running one.

Try starting fluidsynth in daemon mode. Refreshing the midi ports in frescobaldi will then show you its active midi ports, which are the ones you should use for midi playback. You can start fluidsynth manually, or use a user interface wrapper like QSynth which will give you easier control over the fluidsynth startup parameters.

I'm trying to replace timidity with fluidsynth. But I have a couple of issues while trying to use this guide in Debian:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/FluidSynth#ALSA_daemon_mode

1) I can't find the fluidsynth config file.

find /etc -name 'fluidsynth' does not return anything.

2) I'm on debian unstable and I'm using systemd, but there's no fluidsynth service.

However, when I launch this command:

fluidsynth -a alsa /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2 

I see the option in Frescobaldi preferences and can reproduce the MIDI.

But I'd like to be able to set the two points above so I don't have to run the command.

[Federico Bruni]

Eventually I got the best advice from linux-audio-users:

http://lists.linuxaudio.org/pipermail/linux-audio-user/2014-October/099439.html

The easiest way is setting up a service which is started at login.

It should work on any desktop environment which follows the Freedesktop specs.

My fluidsynth command is:

fluidsynth -a pulseaudio -m alsa_seq -i -s -p FluidSynth -R 0 -C 0 -c 2 -z 512 -r 48000  /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2

Setting the port is very important, so it's always the same and you don't have to set it in Frescobaldi preferences.