Re: [timidity-talk] TiMidity++-2.12.0-0 OK TiMidity++-2.13.1-0 not OK linux

[Eric A. W. <ew...@cc...>]

On Sat, 4 Dec 2004, rico wrote:

> Hello,
> i'm using timidity as an alsa server  with wine for band in a box and 
> rosegarden.
> My distro is mandrake and i use  mandrake's rpms.
> i noticed that timidity++-2.12.0-0 is works great whereas
> timidity++2.13.0-0 produces awfuls noises crackles stop-and-go with rosegarden 
> or band in a box (through wine).

A bug was introduced shortly before 2.13.0 was released that could cause
crackling noises in all interpolation modes, but the only interpolation
mode I noticed it with was Newton interpolation, which you probably aren't
using.  It was fixed in 2.13.1 and newer.  I don't know if this could be
causing your problem or not.

Does timidity play regular midi files ok?  If midi playback (non-ALSA) is
ok, but ALSA playback is bad, it could be some sort of ALSA problem.  I
don't know much about the ALSA server mode.

I have used the Windows midi server, though, and I know that it takes
A LOT more CPU than playing midi files.  I'm going to guess this is
because it can't pre-cache any of the resampling?  Anyways, the default
interpolation mode is -N 25 Gauss-like interpolation, which is too
CPU intensive for the midi server to play smoothly on my machine.  You
might try using a smaller -N number and see if that helps.  If -N 5 does
not play smoothly, try -EFresamp=L (4-point Lagrange, similar in quality
ot -N 3 Gauss but much faster), or -EFresamp=l (linear interpolation,
the fastest mode but also the lowest quality).

If I remember correctly, 2.12.0 didn't have Gauss-like interpolation?  If
so, then the default options for 2.12.x would run much faster than the
defaults for 2.13.x, so it might be possible that the crackling could come
from running low on CPU?

> I want to upgrade or change my distro but i'm stuck with timidity++-2.12-0 and 
> mandrake 10.0.

Do you feel up to downloading the newest version and compiling it
yourself?  There's no need for RPMs if you are familiar with compiling
applications :)

You might also try downloading RPMs of newer version that were created for
other distros.  It has been my experience that RPMs for one distro often
work ok with another.  Hopefully any dependency issues will be reported by
rpm when you try to install the newer version, and then you can hunt down
other RPMs that are needed for those dependencies.  Finding RPMs to fix
dependency problems, and further dependencies introduced by those RPMs,
etc. can be a real hassle, but hopefully the timidity RPMs won't have very
many dependencies.

So, either try compiling a new version yourself, or download and install
newer RPMs made for other distributions.

-Eric