Tag Archives: Sound

Midi sound with Wine/PlayOnLinux

Introduction

I’ve always loved Guitar Pro 5 as a quite good tool to learn and practice tabs, there are new versions, but I stick to that one. Sadly it only runs on Windows and I don’t have one anymore therefore I decided to run it using PlayOnLinux. After installing Guitar Pro 5 quite easily, I came across one main problem, I had no midi sound. The problem is not only related to Guitar pro, but is related to the need of midi with PlayOnLinux or Wine.

Timidity

As the man says, timidity is a “MIDI-to-WAVE converter and player”,  it simply means for us that it will do the trick between our OS and the software inside PlayOnLinux. Up in !

Let’s install timidity and freepats:

# aptitude install timidity freepats
Install timidity and freepats

Now that we have timidity we just need to make a wrapper to start Guitar Pro 5, or any other software. You can use this script and adapt it to your needs:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# starting timdity
timidity -iA -B2,8 -Os -EFreverb=0 &

# get timidity's PID
_PID="$!"

# start GP5
/usr/share/playonlinux/playonlinux --run "GP5"

# clean up
kill -9 ${_PID}

Quite simple, we just start timidity then our software, here GP5 is the name of my virtual drive in PlayOnLinux, and we kill timidity. Yeah the kill is bad but SIGQUIT wouldn’t work, I got tired.

Don’t forget to chmod it to be executable.

Finally we can make a shortcut on our desktop (~/GP5.desktop):

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=GP5
Comment=PlayOnLinux
Type=Application
Exec=/home/floreo/Workspace/scripts/GP5.sh
Icon=/home/floreo/.PlayOnLinux//icones/full_size/GP5
Name[fr_FR]=GP5
StartupWMClass=GP5.exe
Categories=
Path=
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=false
GP5.desktop

As you may notice, line 6 is the call to our wrapper.

Configure MIDI output in Guitar Pro 5

For those who don’t know and are interested about Guitar Pro 5’s audio configuration, once you are done with the setup I’ve shown, you still need to configure the correct MIDI output. In Guitar Pro 5, go to Options > Audio Settings (MIDI/RSE). Select TiMidity port 0 as the first port output device.

GP5 audio settings MIDI

Select TiMidity port 0 as first device MIDI output

Troubleshooting

I didn’t use it enough yet, but I got some cracking sound sometimes, for now I save what i’m doing in Guitar Pro and restart it. I guess the problem could be solved by giving extra parameters to timidity. If I find anything I’ll let you know.