HOWTO: Getting MIDI to work fully in Ubuntu

[Perkins]

Thos should probably go into the how-to section. Or, if it's already there, it should be made a little easier to find...

[MishMich]

The original post was very helpful I have just installed Ubuntu Studio (8.10) and had expected this to just work (I use Debian for those times I don't want to play - Ubuntu for when I just want stuff to work, like wireless or, in this case set up a PC to run my Technics Digital Piano through). OK, so I read up on this first, and managed to get a Creative Live! card as that allowed for hardware sythesis and was midi compatible via the joystick port. Running through the steps above, I managed to get the Creative soundcard to play midi tracks out via the stereo jack and the same for the software synthesis. But, I cannot get the keyboard to talk to the PC - either in or out. It is quite important for me to do this, because I like to set up a score and have it play through the keyboard, or play into the PC so I can add synth sounds to the presets on the keyboard. I used to be able to do this with a cheapo-keyboard on the Atari ST fairly easily over 20 years ago. I also was able to do this with this keyboard using an old Pentium with a Steinberg ISA card without much hassle. So, am I missing something crucial here? Surely it should just play through the soundcard as an external device - but I only see one channel listed. When I set the channel 1 on rosegarden to the external device, it reads as 'grand piano' (which is what the keyboard is set to), but the notes I play do not appear and nothing is recorded. Similarly, if I play the SF2 file and direct it to the external device, nothing happens.

Thanks.

[MishMich]

Ah. It was something obvious I was missing - the din plug that says 'in' goes in the 'out' port on the keyboard, and the one that says 'out' goes in the 'in' port. I figured 'in' went with 'in' and 'out' went with 'out'. All seems to work fine so far. Thanks again.

[adamgram]

I went through this how-to this morning and wasn't able to get very far. I'm trying to run rosegarden on my laptop so I can write music in the notation editor and record midi files from a keyboard. For now, I just want to be able to hear the music I write in rosegarden.

Before going through this how-to I downloaded Jack and QSynth, but I'm a little confused about how each of these is supposed to work. Assuming the onboard sound on my laptop does not have built in midi sounds, do I need QSynth to make sounds while using rosegarden? Is it a matter of rosegarden telling the synth what to play and the synth making the sound or can rosegarden work without it? Also, should QSynth by itself be able to make sounds? (That would help me troubleshoot the problem if nothing else).

As for the actual how-to, I pasted below the problems I ran into (marked with a *** prefix to my expaination), if anyone could explain these errors I would really appreciate it.


HOWTO: Getting MIDI to work fully in Ubuntu
MIDI: Getting to Create, Play, Anything with Ubuntu!

Intro
MIDI support has been asked for mostly musically involved people who use Linux, and it hasn't come easily. Most of the HOW-TOs for setting up MIDIs don't even work, and I'd know. So, today, after almost a month of working towards it, I've finally been able to listen, play, and create MIDIs with ease. It's actually not very difficult; you just need the right packages and a loaded GM Soundfont.

Prerequisites
- A MIDI enabled sound card (most people have a SoundBlaster Audigy or Live! card-- if you have onboard sound, meaning the motherboard does the MIDI work, you'll need to use FluidSynth, which I'll talk about later).
*** I have ATI IXP AC97 onboard sound

- A fully working ALSA sound system.
*** ALSA shows up under system--> preferences--> sound and the test sound plays for everything EXCEPT sound capture

- A fully working OSS sound system. (in case the upper doesn't work, you can use this and then do a sudo modprobe snd-seq-oss)
*** OSS shows up under system--> preferences--> sound but I get an error message when I hit the 'test' button:
audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink: Could not open audio device for playback. Device is being used by another application.

- The following ALSA packages installed (get these through apt-get/synaptic/aptitude):
alsa-base
libasound
*** E: Couldn't find package libasound
*** I do have libasound2
alsa-headers
*** heather@heather-laptop:~$ sudo apt-get install alsa-headers
*** Reading package lists... Done
*** Building dependency tree
*** Reading state information... Done
*** Package alsa-headers is not available, but is referred to by *** another package.
*** This may mean that the package is missing, has been
*** obsoleted, or is only available from another source
*** However the following packages replace it:
*** libasound2-dev
*** E: Package alsa-headers has no installation candidate

libasound-dev,
alsa-modules-2.4.26-1-686 (replace the 686 with 586, 386, k6, k7, etc. according to your system)
*** E: Couldn't find package alsa-modules-2.4.26-1-686

alsa-oss
alsa-source

- A program that plays MIDI files. (KMid is a nice one)
*** E: Couldn't find package KMid

The awesfx package if you are not using FluidSynth. (get this through apt-get)

Blood, Sweat, and Tears time (not really)
You've gotten past most of the work which took me the most time. Some of the packages you install may seem like overkill, but for people who use FluidSynth and have to compile it and other things, those packages are good to have just in case.

Do an lsmod in the terminal. It should return something like this

Quote:
snd_seq_midi 8096 1
snd_emu10k1_synth 6784 4
snd_emux_synth 33408 5 snd_emu10k1_synth
snd_seq_virmidi 7296 1 snd_emux_synth
snd_seq_midi_emul 7680 1 snd_emux_synth
(etc)

If you don't see any MIDI related modules
the important ones are
snd_seq_midi
snd_emu10k1_synth
*** E: Couldn't find package snd_emu10k1_synth

snd_emux_synth
*** E: Couldn't find package snd_emux_synth

snd_ seq_oss
snd_seq
snd_emu10k1
*** E: Couldn't find package snd_emu10k1

snd_rawmidi

[Fenderian_Mayhew]

okay. i just got midi out (my personal goal) by using Linux MultiMedia studio and a SF2 file.

[curts]

After several evenings of digging, I've come to the conclusion the hardware synthesis for the Ensoniq/Creative AudioPCI ES1371+ chip is simply not supported by Debian/Ubuntu (i.e. no synth driver like the emu10k1), but MIDI communication probably is (but that wasn't my goal and I do not have any MIDI h/w to test it).

Using Ubuntu 10.4.x:

cat /dev/sndstat
Sound Driver:3.8.1a-980706 (ALSA v1.0.21 emulation code)
Kernel: Linux Panther2 2.6.32-29-generic #58-Ubuntu SMP Fri Feb 11 20:52:10 UTC 2011 x86_64
Config options: 0

Installed drivers: 
Type 10: ALSA emulation

Card config: 
Ensoniq AudioPCI ENS1371 at 0xdc00, irq 17
USB Device 0x46d:0x8d7 at usb-0000:00:10.1-2, full speed
VIA 8237 with ALC850 at 0xd800, irq 22

Audio devices:
0: ES1371 DAC2/ADC (DUPLEX)
1: USB Audio
2: VIA 8237 (DUPLEX)

Synth devices: NOT ENABLED IN CONFIG

Midi devices:
0: ES1371

Timers:
31: system timer

Mixers:
0: TriTech TR28602
1: USB Mixer
2: Realtek ALC850 rev 0

This conclusion is further supported by the information in the ALSA sound card database. The ES1371 is not listed as having wavetable support, while the emu10k1 Sound Blaster Live and Sound Blaster 32 AWE cards others mention do have wavetable support. Hopefully, this post will be helpful for other ES1371 owners.

Further complicating my search, most of the ALSA configuration info I could find predated the use of Pulse Audio. While MIDI is perhaps a niche area for Linux support, I believe it is still of significant interest to musicians with MIDI-capable instruments. The MIDI How-to guides could probably use an update.

[treii28]

After several evenings of digging, I've come to the conclusion the hardware synthesis for the Ensoniq/Creative AudioPCI ES1371+ chip is simply not supported by Debian/Ubuntu

I've been arriving at a similar conclusion after similar searching. I picked up a SB 16 PCI the other day and although I can see the midi port and can seem to send data to it with aconnect, no sound comes out. Either there's a mixer bar hiding somewhere that isn't showing up in the alsa mixers or it thinks it's sending it out the joystick/midi-out port.
(that or there's some other magic word or black-magic rite I haven't done yet to please the Linux gods. Maybe I'll trying sprinkling the burnt remains of a rainbow butterfly at the foot of a penguin idol tonight and see if that helps)

[mistermanugo]

Hey everyone, I tried to do what is told in the first post. I installed all the alsa packages, fluidsynth, etc...

This is what I obtain after typing the lsmod command:

"
Module Size Used by
btrfs 462393 0
zlib_deflate 19568 1 btrfs
crc32c 2519 1
libcrc32c 875 1 btrfs
ufs 72774 0
qnx4 6484 0
hfsplus 70800 0
hfs 40754 0
minix 25197 0
ntfs 94919 0
vfat 8933 0
msdos 6392 0
fat 47767 2 vfat,msdos
jfs 172461 0
xfs 513318 0
exportfs 3437 1 xfs
reiserfs 225449 0
aes_i586 7268 3
aes_generic 26863 1 aes_i586
binfmt_misc 6587 1
ppdev 5259 0
vboxnetadp 6390 0
vboxnetflt 12740 0
vboxdrv 169169 2 vboxnetadp,vboxnetflt
snd_hda_codec_atihdmi 2367 1
snd_hda_codec_idt 52042 1
snd_hda_intel 22165 2
snd_hda_codec 74201 3 snd_hda_codec_atihdmi,snd_hda_codec_idt,snd_hda_in tel
snd_hwdep 5412 1 snd_hda_codec
snd_pcm_oss 35308 0
snd_mixer_oss 13746 1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm 70918 3 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_pcm_oss
arc4 1153 2
snd_seq_dummy 1338 0
snd_seq_oss 26722 0
snd_seq_midi 4557 0
snd_rawmidi 19056 1 snd_seq_midi
snd_seq_midi_event 6003 2 snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi
snd_seq 47263 6 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_mid i_event
snd_timer 19098 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq
snd_seq_device 5700 5 snd_seq_dummy,snd_seq_oss,snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi ,snd_seq
joydev 8740 0
ath9k 306430 0
fbcon 35102 71
tileblit 1999 1 fbcon
fglrx 2093229 32
snd 54244 16 snd_hda_codec_idt,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_ hwdep,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_seq_os s,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device
font 7557 1 fbcon
bitblit 4707 1 fbcon
softcursor 1189 1 bitblit
mac80211 205402 1 ath9k
ath 7611 1 ath9k
lirc_ene0100 6600 0
lirc_dev 8884 1 lirc_ene0100
video 17375 0
psmouse 63677 0
output 1871 1 video
serio_raw 3978 0
hp_accel 11144 0
lis3lv02d 6096 1 hp_accel
input_polldev 2482 1 lis3lv02d
agpgart 31788 1 fglrx
soundcore 6620 1 snd
vga16fb 11385 1
vgastate 8961 1 vga16fb
snd_page_alloc 7172 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm
uvcvideo 57406 0
videodev 34361 1 uvcvideo
v4l1_compat 13251 2 uvcvideo,videodev
shpchp 28899 0
i2c_piix4 8527 0
cfg80211 126144 3 ath9k,mac80211,ath
led_class 2864 2 ath9k,hp_accel
lp 7028 0
parport 32635 2 ppdev,lp
r8169 34396 0
mii 4381 1 r8169
ahci 32392 2
"

It seems that I'm missing some midi lines, so if someone knows what do I have to do, please help mme

Thank you !