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Re: How can I hear MIDI with an SB AWE 128?



On Sun, Jun 25, 2000 at 01:02:07PM +0300, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> 
> I have a SB AWE 128 card. I manage to hear digital audio (such as WAV
> files or MOD files) with it, either by using the kernel Ensonique module
> or the ALSA one.
> 
> Still, I am unable to hear any MIDI. The SB AWE 32/64 driver does not
> produce any sound, and I cannot find the MIDI lever in the mixers.
> 
> Does anybody know, how, if at all, I can play MIDI files using this card?

This card is not of the AWE series, but a PCI32/64/128 (and so on),
built on Ensoniq's (which Creative bought) chip. The 32/64/128
doesn't really matter, since all the MIDI synth is done in software
(it has no hardware mixing like AWE/Live, no on-board RAM like
AWE, and no 'beeping' FM generator OPL-3 chip like previous SB16).
And the soft-synth driver is Windows-specific.
To make wave and sound possible together, they have two PCM chnannels
you can control separately. Windows calls the second one MIDI :)
BTW, Windows 2000 ships with Microsoft's MIDI soft-synth
driver with samples from Ronald, in case you have an FM-chip
based MIDI.

Try 'timidity', a free user-space midi synth program which can use
Gravis Ultrasound samples (they ain't so good though - get them
at http://www.maz-sound.com), and also as rumoured,
Creative's Soundfonts, which should be much better (judging from
the samples they provided for the Ensoniq cards).
Get 'timidity' at Freshmeat.

The kernel also has some mixing thingie from 4Front.
Never tried it.

-- 
Best regards,
Ilya Konstantinov a.k.a Toastie

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