Timidity++ 2.13.2

My search for a free, quality MIDI player has found a mark!

I've been looking for a MIDI player that combines the ability to read Musical Instrument Digital Interface files and play them back using high quality sampled instruments for years. I don't really know how this free application slipped through the cracks, but it sounds like a million bucks!

Up until now most MIDI clients used the sound card's codecs to output wave music and the result was sometimes okay, but usually tinny and sounding like a video game from 1985. I was nearly to the point of investing in a really expensive sound card, but I knew that an off the shelf sound card that has the capability to sample and digitize sounds should be able to make MIDI sound like real music. The magic is in software, not hardware.

Timidity is very different than your standard MIDI client, and ads some neat bells and whistles for those of you who understand mixing and sampling. Try it, I guarantee you will be pleasantly surprised.

Here's a screen shot.




By default, this sets itself up through OLE to read files that end in .MID automatically, so you can double click on a MIDI file and expect it to play. You can also direct the program to an entire folder of MIDI files and it will play them one by one, or randomly.

As with many open source projects, there are ports to other operating systems besides Windows XP, including Linux and Windows 95. Splendid work!

But it would be slighting this package to describe Timidity as a MIDI client. From the web site:

TiMidity++ is a software synthesizer. It can play MIDI files by converting them into PCM waveform data; give it a MIDI data along with digital instrument data files, then it synthesizes them in real-time, and plays. It can not only play sounds, but also can save the generated waveforms into hard disks as various audio file formats.

TiMidity++ is free software, distributed under the terms of GNU general public license.

While on the subject of MIDI, for serious collectors of MIDI files, shy away from so-called "free" MIDI web sites. They are not, and if they are, you generally don't want what goes along with agreeing to whatever they want you to agree to (most likely spam or adware).

Use a Usenet News client such as XNEWS, and check out the newsgroup alt.binaries.sounds.midi. Of course the only drawback to plundering usenet is you end up with a great deal of everything, and not necessarily the piece you are looking for.

I need a "Midi Sorter."

Enjoy!

Mike