[Alsa-user] SBLive! and MIDI

[Matthew G. <mg...@te...>]

Hi all,

I'm using an SBLive! in my machine at home at the moment and I'm having
a bit of trouble with MIDI output. MIDI in from my (music) keyboard
seems to be fine, but using something like pmidi to play a midi file or
output from rosegarden and friends gives dead silence.

I've sfxloaded a few soundfonts using a simple command line like:

  sfxload -V100 crud.sf2

and I've tried a few different ones, just on the off chance that the
fonts on the creative CD were broken. It appears as though the
soundfonts have been correctly loaded when I compare a before and after
of sfxload -M.

pmidi -l shows five output ports. One's clearly the joystick plug on the
back of the card and the others are the emu10k1 wavetable ports. I
obviously need to use one of the wavetable ports for what I'm trying to
achieve. I'm not sure what the difference between these four ports are,
but it didn't seem to matter which I used.

I thought it could have been (and it still could be) a mixer problem. I
spent about 30 minutes with alsamixergui and some midi files playing in
the background, trying different combinations of mixer settings to no
avail. PCM audio works fine.

/proc/modules shows the emu10k1 card module and the emu synth module (as
well as their dependencies).

I'm using a SuSE 8.2 workstation (alsa-0.9.0.cvs20030217-31) and I've
tried updating everything from source to later versions (0.9.[4-6] and
1.0.0rc1).

My .asoundrc is currently empty. Does this file have any effect on MIDI
anyway?

This topic has come up in a few forums before, but the symptoms seem
different. Many of the other problems people have had have been fixed by
loading soundfonts or the emu synth module.

Does anyone have any suggestions for other things to try?

thx,
Matt