cracking sound playing .midi file

[Shawn]

Using Fedora Core 3
timidity++-2.13.0-3

I get an error.

 $ timidity  /Rei/music/saita.mid
esd: No such file or directory
Couldn't open Enlightened sound daemon (`e')


so I started esd

esd &

then it played but with a cracking sound.  The file sounded fine before
and all files are like that so I don't think that is it.

any ideas.  should I start esd differently?