Making TiMidity run

[digiday]

Hi him,

I'm the guy who got all the advice from steve on installing and running TiMidity... you may get some better advice from steve, but I did find myself that I have to close, re-open and re-set the settings sometimes in TiMidity to make it work... it is a quirky little program... go through these steps again and see if this makes it work...

To render the MIDI file to a WAV file
Click on "Config" and select "Preference"
Below the "Output" pane, click the "Output File" button to set the output directory and file name. You can select "Output: "RIFF WAVE file" in the "Output" pane above, but this changes the output without changing the "Output" menu choice in the main window, and then further changes in the Output menu have no effect in that TiMidity session. So better to click "OK" now in "Preference", then click "Output: "RIFF WAVE file"

Finally, click the Play button to start rendering the MIDI as a WAV file. The file will be complete when the timer in the display stops running (you won't hear any sound during this process)... this is a faster than real play time process that is pretty quick.

I'll say that I found there are two things that make the difference between TiMidity producing good WAV files that have sound data and TiMidity producing full size WAV files that DO NOT have any sound data.

1) Just choose "RIFF WAVE file" under output to begin with and don't bother choosing "Windows audio driver" first in order to listen to the MIDI file... you already know what it sounds like, though if you do use TiMidity for an audio PLAYER, then DO choose the "Windows audio driver"

2) Then have your settings in "Config>Preference>Output" chosen before hand, before the file is dropped on to TiMidity, with a destination folder and a generic name for new file conversions like "newSONG.wav" or something like that which can then be later changed on the file itself to match the original MIDI song file name... these two steps made the difference in successfully producing WAV audio files out of MIDI song files.

digiday

[himynameisjonnycap]

Well, thanks for the effort, I had no such luck with your advice. I even went as far as deleting the all the program files and re-downloading and re-installing.
That didn't even work.

Now I'm wondering, maybe TiMidity just hates my guts..?

I got the same console Information as before.
Maybe its the MIDI file?

That doesn't make much sense though because it has already worked for these MIDI files.

In the process of writing this response, I went back over my MIDI exporting and found a flaw in the exporting function.
Thank you for the support!
I got it working now!

[digiday]

That's great him,

I had allot of trial and error with my experience too... in fact, I still have to reset the settings over again, close and open TiMidity and fool with it sometimes in the process of using it... all of a sudden, out of nowhere it just starts making full size empty files now and then.

I figure the real expert on TiMidity, steve, is quietly watching to see how you are doing with my amateur advice.

I'm glad that worked out.

digiday

[steve]

I figure the real expert on TiMidity, steve, is quietly watching to see how you are doing with my amateur advice.

As you've used TiMidity on Windows for more than 20 minutes in the last 5 years, I think that now makes you the expert digi
I do use Timidity on Linux, but it's quite a different beast (even though the "internals" are identical).

[Irish]

Given the difficulty there seems to be with Timidity, can I suggest an alternative for converting MIDI to wav?

MuseScore http://musescore.org/ is a free cross-platform program designed for writing music scores and, from personal experience, I know it produces excellent results in that area.

It will also import and play MIDI files and can export them as .wav, .flac or .ogg files. (Plus you can get a written score of the music as a pdf!)
I have only used it in simple applications, so I don't know how well it will cope with multiple voices, but it downloads quickly, and works "out of the box", so IMHO it is worth a try.

The MuseScore home page also has some links to sources of SoundFont files.

POL

[steve]

MuseScore is a really nice program and works well on Linux. However its main function is as a score writing program. It's MIDI playback and rendering abilities are rather limited compared to other programs (such as Timidity).

Here's two samples of a piano piece that have been rendered from the same MIDI file using the same soundfont. The first extract is created by MuseScore and the second version by Timidity. I think you'll agree that the MuseScore render is rather mediocre in comparison to Timidity.

[Irish]

Point taken.

POL