Kmid - Does it work or is there a replacement for MIDI files?

[Kevin Kofler]

> Timidity works just fine, but that is not a fix IMHO. 
> In the past I jerked out the soundcard, rebooted to 
> allow the hardware gizmo to uload it, then (with 
> modprobe.conf edited to remove all reference to a 
> soundcard, and then with the  machine safely off) 
> re-inserted the card, then rebooted to get the 
> hardware install gizmo to make it's own entries 
> into /etc/modprode.conf and THEN mid! 
 
That can work only if your soundcard actually has hardware MIDI synthesis. 
Otherwise, using Timidity is your only option (but you can use it as an ALSA 
sequencer to emulate hardware MIDI). For example, the old classic SoundBlaster 
16 did have hardware FM synthesis, but the newer (in comparison) SoundBlaster 
128 PCI does everything in software (try looking in the device properties for a 
SoundBlaster 128 PCI on that other OS and you'll see that it is also using 
software synthesis), because this allows doing (higher-quality) wavetable 
synthesis (and offloads all the work to the CPU, which is much faster than it 
used to in SB16 times). 
 
        Kevin Kofler