Timidity and Mandrake 9.1

[TheGreenKnight]

Hi, I'm just posting this for reference.

I have Mandrake 9.1 and there is an RPM called kdemultimedia that includes noatun, kmidi, kmid, kmix, KsCD and many other useful programs. Included within this is a version of timidity (kmidi uses it to play mid files).

The trouble is, both Exult and XU4 won't work with this particular incarnation of timidity, but searching on the Mandrake install disks shows up a standalone RPM of timidity and an accompanying RPM of sounds/patches, and THESE WORK.

A problem lies in the fact that you can't have everything installed, because RPMDRAKE (the Mandrake RPM installer) states that the timidity RPM is incompatible with the kdemultimedia RPM, so you have one or the other.

In the end I reinstalled kdemultimedia and downloaded the Exult Roland ogg files anyway, so there's no real loss. As for my XU4, well that unfortunately is a victim.

Cheers,
TheGreenKnight

[TheGreenKnight]

Actually before I go, I have one question/observation:-

I see on the timidity site http://www.onicos.com/staff/iz/timidity ... nload.html there is the source code. Would it be possible to place the timidity binary and it's accompanying cfg file into the the same folder as the exult binary so that this version gets called instead of the one in /usr/bin/ ?

Just a thought.

[Gradilla Dragon]

Did you try installing the sound patches along with kdemultimedia?

Anyways, what do you want kdemultimedia for? There are far better multimedia apps.

[wjp]

Exult uses SDL_Mixer's internal timidity synthesizer, so you don't need a timidity binary. The only things it needs are the patches and the timidity.cfg config file. I think SDL_mixer looks for the config file in /usr/share/timidity/timidity.cfg (and possibly the current directory as well).

[TheGreenKnight]

Ok thanks for the help guys. I got it to work, here's how:-

On the Mandrake CD were two files, TiMidity++-2.11 and timidity-instruments-1.0. The kdemultimedia package has timidity v2i but no installed instrument patches, so I extracted the TiMidity++-2.11 and timidity-instruments-1.0 RPMs into my home directory and put the instrument patches into /usr/share/timidity/instruments and the timidity.cfg into both /usr/share/timidity and /usr/local/bin (where the exult binary is). The command to extract the RPMs is 'rpm2cpio packagename.rpm | cpio -idmv --no-absolute-filenames'.

Now Exult and XU4 work with midi

Cheers, and hope this helps anyone else in the future.