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I'm pretty new to ubuntu. I bought an acer aspire v5 laptop and installed Ubuntu. So far everything worked in the way I want it, except frescobaldi.

It's an editor for lilypond files. There's a midi-player included. I installed timidity and followed the instructions, however the midi player doesn't produce any sound. There's no error message or anything but it's pretty clear that it doesn't work. Every other sound application worked fine so far and I am able to use the timidity midi player to play my midi-files. Its just the built-in midi player in frescobaldi that doesnt work.

How to solve this?

I googled it for hours now and there doesn't seem to be anyone else with a similar problem.

user279897
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3 Answers3

3

This is a bit late, but for future reference I found that running

sudo timidity -iA

and then refreshing the MIDI ports in Frescobaldi (Edit->Preferences->MIDI Settings->Refresh MIDI ports) does the trick in my version (2.0.13).

eboix
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3

When using Frescobaldi in Ubuntu 15.10, the package libportmidi0 must be installed so that Midi playback works correctly.

Just install it using a terminal:

sudo apt-get install libportmidi0

Tested with QSynth, Patchage et VMPK midi tools.

Cf. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/frescobaldi/+bug/1572566

Danibix
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emcastro
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There’s a old discussion of this issue on the Frescobaldi lists, in the thread midi will not play from within frescobaldi.

The issue is that Frescobaldi is looking for an ALSA port providing a MIDI sequencer, and you need to persuade timidity to provide this.

You will need to start the timidity daemon by running

sudo service timidity start

then refresh the MIDI ports within Frescobaldi. This just now worked for me (Ubuntu 14.10) and may be all you need. But for completeness—

If this does not suffice, edit /etc/default/timidity; where it says,

# uncomment to override enabling triggered by availability of timidity-deamon
# TIM_ALSASEQ=false

(i.e., it defaults to enabled but you can override this) you might need to explicitly enable the ALSA port by changing the line to

TIM_ALSASEQ=true

But again, I found this step to be unnecessary, and probably so will you.

Kristopher Ives
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J. C. Salomon
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  • Dosen't work for me, unfortunately. sudo service timidity start gives me * Starting TiMidity++ ALSA midi emulation.... However, in the Frescobaldi MIDI settings I only get "Midi Through Port-0" as MIDI port, even if I refresh MIDI ports or restart Frescobaldi. Tried both with the default /etc/default/timidity and with TIM_ALSASEQ=true. Any further advice? – Thomas W. Dec 13 '15 at 08:26
  • Take this to the Frescobaldi list, is all I can suggest. – J. C. Salomon Dec 13 '15 at 11:44
  • https://askubuntu.com/a/1238036/21140 works for me. – J. C. Salomon Feb 13 '22 at 02:45