HOW TO SET UP TIMIDITY UNDER LINUX WITH KDE

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TiMidity is a GPLed MIDI player with software wavetable synthesis. Since most of the sound cards supported under Linux have FM synthesis, have heavily software-assisted wavetable MIDI synthesis, or have no MIDI synthesizer, TiMidity is quite popular under Linux. The second category, software-assisted MIDI synthesis, almost never works under Linux because those sound cards depend heavily on driver software, and the sound card company is not willing to release the specifications for interfacing with the card. This is also why so-called 'Winmodems' don't work under Linux. Anyway, here are step-by-step directions for installing TiMidity. TiMidity is available at http://www.timidity.jp.

Note that if you have Debian, read this paragraph because TiMidity and a patch set are bundled with your operating system. I wrote this guide before I realized that. :) To set it up under Debian, get to a command prompt, and type 'dselect'. Select 'Select', and press '/', type 'timidity', and make sure both 'timidity' and 'timidity-patches' are both selected. Press ENTER, and select 'install'. When that's finished, quit dselect, type 'exit', and skip to step 6!

0. Log in as root in a console *or* KDE session. If you chose the KDE session, click on the 'konsole' icon in your panel. It has a seashell icon in it.

1. Get the Linux (source code) version of TiMidity and follow the directions for compiling and installation. You may want to compile it with the 'ncurses', and 'gtk' interfaces. Timidity is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

2. Get the eawpats set. It's linked to on the TiMidity website. NOTE: It's ~25 MB compressed; this will take a while to download if, like me, you do not have a fast Internet connection.

3. UnRAR eawpats into some directory. I use /usr/local/eawpats (or something like that...) You may choose almost anywhere.

4. Open the 'timidity.cfg' file that comes with eawpats in a text editor (like ne, NEdit, or KDE's Advanced Editor). Find a line that says 'path c:\timidity'. Change it to point to where you unrared the eawpats. Save and close that file.

5. Move timidity.cfg to /etc/.

6. Log into your normal user account in KDE.

6. Open a Konquerer browser window. One way of doing this is by double-clicking 'Home' on the desktop.

7. Go to Options, Configure Konquerer.

8. On the file types setup screen, select the MIDI file type under 'Audio'.

9. Add an association, and type 'timidity'. Make sure that "Run in a terminal" is ON.

10. You may want to move TiMidity to the top so that middle-clicking a MIDI file plays it in TiMidity.

11. Repeat this for the Karaoke type.

12. Add a type for 'RIFF-MIDI', and define the filename patterns as '*.RMI' and '*.rmi'. Repeat the procedure above to associate TiMidity with RMI files.

That's it!