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

Scrutico to extract icon images

Awhile back I reviewed PhotoFiltre, a free photo editor from Antonio Da Cruz that is, by the way, available in a simply amazing number of languages. While these apps are not open source, they are free, and that's nice!

The same outfit gives us Scrutico, which scans a directory for icon files, or executable files that contain embedded icons. The program also allows the operator to extract embedded icons as Windows .ico files, which I understand to be, effectively, small and low resolution bitmap (BMP) files.

There are a host of utilities out there to help us create icons, but Scrutico unveils so many icon images that I had no idea were on my computer, that I would hesitate to go to the trouble of creating new icons.

Scrutico does not require installation, does not apparently write anything to the Windows Registry, and can be run from a USB drive. It's downside is that the program's interface is in French. This was not a drawback for me since the little utilities tool bar contained fairly descriptive pictographs, and Scrutico is so simple in operation it's a snap, even in French.

Here is a screen shot of the icon images it found embedded in .EXE files in my c:\windows directory:



Allow me to translate:

Dossier de recherche: "File of research" This would be the directory that Scrutico searches for icon images.

Fichiers: "Files" This is actually one of four different file extensions for files that icon images can reside in - EXE, DLL, ICO and ICL.

Limite, I assume, is the limit beyond which Scrutico will stop looking for icon files.

The button is the "go" button. It starts Scrutico to work, and the utility works blindingly fast, finding a list of icons embedded in EXE files, as specified.

The button is what you press when you want to export (extract) the image and turn it into an actual icon (ico) file. Some of them, of course, may already be in this form, in which case the extraction process is really just a file copy operation. Note that this button is grayed out and not usable until you select one or more of the images to export. Hold your Ctrl key down as you click on the images if you want to extract more than one at a time. Then when you do the extraction, and standard explorer window pops up that allows you to direct where you want the newly minted icons to go. Give the icon an expressive name, then click "Save" and your done!

Now, what would I use all these icons for anyway? Right now I can only think of one use - older games that for whatever reason have not been assigned an icon, and come out looking like this on your desktop: , which is not very inspiring!

Searching the world far and wide for you, I remain....

Mike Moore

PS: Merci Antonio!