AMIDI-Plug 0.7 review
DownloadAMIDI-Plug is a MIDI input plugin for XMMS/BMP/Audacious
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AMIDI-Plug is a MIDI input plugin for XMMS/BMP/Audacious. AMIDI-Plug processes MIDI files and sends their events to one or more ALSA sequencer client ports. Any hardware or software synthesizer, as long as it provides ALSA sequencer ports, can be used to play MIDI with AMIDI-Plug.
Playback is fully functional: play, stop, seek, pause, song information are available.
In example, AMIDI-Plug can send MIDI to the emu10k1 hardware synth or to software synths such as timidity and fluidsynth.
AMIDI-Plug supports MIDI files in SMF (standard midi file) format type 0 and type 1, as well as RIFF MIDI containing SMF 0 and 1.
Installation:
Installation is pretty straighforward:
configure --with-player=PLAYER
make
make install
where PLAYER is one between xmms, bmp or audacious.
Other configuration options are available, like --prefix to install in a different location.
Use --help to list all available configuration options.
Dependecies vary with the chosen player:
ALSA libs are always required;
GTK+ 2.x required for Audacious and BMP;
GTK+ 1.x required for XMMS;
of course, headers and libraries that come with the chosen player are needed too.
Usage:
The first time the player is launched with AMIDI-Plug installed, it will try to auto-detect and use some ALSA sequencer ports; more specifically, it will search for those of the hardware wavetable synthesizer. Of course, these may not be available on some audio cards; so it's a good idea to check (and modify if needed) the selected ports in the preferences dialog.
In the same dialog there's a mixer control selector. Since AMIDI-Plug sends the MIDI events directly to the ALSA sequencer ports, it doesn't use any effect or output plugin from the player. So the mixer control selected in the preferences dialog is used to tune the volume during playback.
Once these values are set, MIDI files can be picked and played just like any other file type. Playback is fully functional: play, stop, seek, pause, song information are available.
What's New in This Release:
This release introduces a couple of new playback options: a transposer to play MIDI files in different keys, and a drum shifter to change percussion.
It uses the Audacious VFS API to load files.
AMIDI-Plug 0.7 keywords