Re: Nothing heard from MIDI in FC5 with SB Audigy

nigel henry wrote:

On Monday 19 June 2006 20:52, Matthew Munro wrote:

My soundcard appears to be running fine.  I have PCM
sound, and my line input is audible.  But I can't get
KMid to play music.  I see the tracks being played in
`Channel View', but there are no sounds.

I have tried as root and non-root and I have tried all
the MIDI output devices.  But KMid just spews a load
of ALSA messages.  First some `Couldn't allocate
queue' messages, then a load of `AlsaOut::eventInit :
no source'.

I have tried `Test MIDI' in Control Centre too, with
no joy.

What's happening?  Or not happening?

Hi Mathew. The only Creative soundcards that you can play midi through are the EMU ones that have a hardware wavetable synth. Open a Konsole (CLI), type alsamixer. Press F2, and you will get details of the soundcard, including the driver. If it shows emu10k1 you are ok, but there is a bit more to do.

Presuming that it is an emu10k1 you need to load a soundfont for it to work. To load the soundfont you need to install a package "awesfx" (without the quotes) (yum install awesfx). With awesfx installed, insert the cdrom that came with the soundcard, open it in a file manager. With my Audigy2 soundblaster the soundfont is in. Audio/common/SFBANK/CT4MGM.SF2. Copy and paste it to your /home/user/ directory.

There are 2 loaders that come with the awesfx package. One, sfxload is for the OSS (open sound system), and the other, asfxload is for Alsa. On the command line type, as root, asfxload <name_of_soundfont> . In my case this would look like.

asfxload CT4MGM.SF2

Apart from trying to play a midi file with Kmid, you can verify if the soundfont has been loaded by typing, as user. cat /proc/asound/card0/wavetableD1 (changing the card No if you have more than 1 card). If Alsamixer shows that the driver is ca0106 the above won't work, but there is a workaround.

Please post back. Nigel.

Hi Nigel,

Best regards,

Matthew