It's really a pity that in 2021 I still have no out of the box program for playing MIDIs. With a vanilla Windows 95 installation, more then 20 years ago, I could just play a damned MIDI. Sure, the sound quality was shitty, but at least it allows me to get a first glance on the damned file.
Here on my "vanilla" arch linux installation, VLC won't play the MIDI. And https://www.pianojacq.com/ (recommended within this HN page) with Chromium won't either!
Of course it's straightforward, install a few packages and you're done. I just was complaining about the poor adoption of MIDI. A standard linux distribution ships with a web browser, an image viewer, a music player, a PDF reader, but not a MIDI player. MIDI is just not very widespread, unfortunately.
Windows Media Player in Windows 10 still plays MIDI files. They've however removed the option to select a default MIDI device from the configuration GUI, so it'll always play on the built-in software wavetable synth unless you use a third party application to change the default.
For Linux, you can use aplaymidi from alsa-utils to play back on a MIDI port, or timidity for a software wavetable. I think most OS packaged versions of timidity ship with a basic soundfont so that you can listen straight away.
OS X, last I tried in maybe 2016 or 2015, had a built-in software synthesizer, and IIRC one of the built-in players used it for playback, maybe Quicktime.
I'd say support is pretty good considering how unlikely it seems that anyone should use SMAF as a consumption media format these days.
MIDI file playback support in macOS was removed in the 64-bit only transition in Catalina (since it relied on legacy QuickTime). If you opt to install Apple Garageband (free, preinstalled on new Macs I think) then that can play (and edit) them.
The OS still has a software synth and a high-level API for playing them, there's just no bundled app to interface with it.
Kunst der Fuge / kunstderfuge.com (KDF) is a web resource of classical music in .mid files (see M.I.D.I. / MIDI / .mid).
Affiliated to OnClassical - an Italian e-label devoted to classical music recordings - kunstderfuge.com is the major resource of its kind, with its 19,300 .mid music files, c. 1000 composers represented, over 200 contributors (some of whom have an exclusive contract with the label), and an average of 5,000 visitors per day.
The music at kunstderfuge.com is easily organized by composer (from Abel to Zipoli), and the major musical figures have pages devoted to their works. The collection also contains traditional folk music, Medieval and Renaissance music, sacred music and a catalogue of historical piano rolls by notable pianists of the Golden era (read more).
Founded in April 2002, kunstderfuge.com continues to provide each visitor with free daily access to five files, and since 2008, has enjoyed Creative Commons by licensing part of its collection.
The site brings together milions of amateurs, engineers, professional musicians, and thousands of subscribers who share the same passion for MIDI and classical music. Kunst der Fuge also a point of reference for dozens of neglected MIDI sites, giving them both a new life and hosting them in a more popular home [...]
I was surprised and pleased to see that they include piano roll scans in their archive.
The perfect candidate for inclusion in this section of the archive would be the works of Conlon Nancarrow, whose works for player piano were composed directly onto paper rolls. Transcribing them from recordings is prohibitively difficult due to the unusual and precise time relationships between the notes, and the density of the textures. Supposedly his works have been scanned, but the resultant midi files were not made publicly available. Some potential difficulties in doing this are acquiring access to the rolls, and their copyright status.
> Personal use. You may use and play everything from the kunstderfuge.com web site and from its Services for your personal, non-commercial, use only. you agree not to reproduce, retransmit, distribute, disseminate, sell, broadcast, make available to third parties or circulate the musical content downloaded through the Service to anyone, or to exploit any such content for commercial or non-commercial purposes without the express prior written consent of kdf.
We had a normal sound system. We even had two! OSS and Alsa. And then Pulse ate up twenty years of devtime of an innumerable amount of devs to become somewhat usable.
I do not understand these error messages. What am I supposed todo. Except fresh install of course.
sudo apt install pulseaudio-module-jack
[sudo] password for tnoko:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
pulseaudio-module-jack : Depends: libpulse0 (= 1:11.1-1ubuntu7)
but 1:11.1-1ubuntu7.2 is to be installed
Depends: pulseaudio (= 1:11.1-1ubuntu7)
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
"Hold" is a package state that may be set to not change that package in any way. If it is currently installed, keep it installed and at that version, if it is currently not installed, do not install it under any circumstances.
"Broken" means that the package in question has dependency conflicts, unfulfilled dependencies or stuff like that. If an installation, upgrade or deinstallation is requested, the dependency solver will look for a solution without broken packages (naturally). If a broken package is in a "held" state, it cannot be changed, so the solver has no solution without any broken packages, which is why it will give up with the error you are seeing.
Try "apt -f install", and maybe (if it isn't "delete everything", which can happen, or does other undesirable stuff) accept the suggested solution. If that simple fix doesn't help, here are more involved solutions: https://askubuntu.com/questions/223237/unable-to-correct-pro...
The Linux sound system isn't broken. It is in excellent shape. If you choose your distro wisely [1], you will get amazing sound on Linux. You may even discover that Linux Audio rocks hard, like no other platform. [2]
What is not working, is your distributions' responsibility for setting it all up for you. What's your distro?
No; that's on another page (accessible directly from the main one). €20 for the regular subscription, €40 for the mega cool one. One-time payment, by the way; that's not per anything.
There is also a charming story (strangely under new/jazz) about why Mozart started composing fuges:
Wrote Mozart regard to his Fugue K394b :
[...] This fugue has been created expressly for my own Constance. For she will listen to nothing except fugues, particularly fugues by Händel and Bach, and upon hearing me play them, often by heart, she would ask me whether I had never written one; when I answered no, she would reproach me for not wishing to compose the most artistic and the loveliest thing that music had to offer, and never stopped asking me to compose one for her. [...] In time and if the right opportunity arises, I shall write five more and give them to Baron van Sviten [sic!], whom I know to possess a veritable treasure of good music.
Here on my "vanilla" arch linux installation, VLC won't play the MIDI. And https://www.pianojacq.com/ (recommended within this HN page) with Chromium won't either!