Unfortunately, the next chapter about The TiMidity server
won't work if you have a new sound technology called pulseaudio. This
concerns Fedora 11 users and Ubuntu 9.10 users and possibly others. If you
use the soundfont mentioned at http://alsa.opensrc.org/8MBGMSFX.SF2, you'll experience some awful effects like distortion or no sound, at all.
To find out whether you have a pulseaudio or not do:
which pulseaudio
If you get a path as answer you have pulseaudio.
The only workaround is to compile your own TiMidity++. To do this load the newest source from:
http://timidity.sourceforge.net/#download"
Extract and configure the source:
tar -xvjf TiMidity++-x.y.z.tar.bz2
cd TiMidity++-x.y.z
./configure --enable-audio=alsa --enable-server --enable-alsaseq
make
su (give password if requested)
make install
exit
Now you have possibly 2 timidities: One pulsaudio dependent at /usr/bin/timidity and the newly compiled and pulsaudio independent /usr/local/bin/timidity. Use the pulsaudio independent timidity!
A good idea is to prepare a command. You should as root copy the soundfont at a certain position:
cd /usr/share
mkdir sfbank
chmod 0755 sfbank
cd sfbank
cp /<somewhere>/8mbgmsfx.sf2 .
echo 'dir /usr/share/sfbank' >timidity.cfg
echo 'soundfont 8mbgmsfx.sf2' >> timidity.cfg
chmod 0644 8mbgmsfx.sf2 timidity.cfg
cd /usr/bin
echo '#!/bin/bash' > alsatimidity.sh
echo '' >> alsatimidity.sh
echo '/usr/local/bin/timidity -c /usr/share/sfbank/timidity.cfg -iA -B2,8 -Os1l -s 44100' >> alsatimidity.sh
chmod 0755 alsatimidity.sh
Now the call
alsatimidity.sh
should start the timidity in server mode.
If the sound problems remain remove the pulsaudio package from your system!