2006-05-07, 15:34The lifespan of bugsThis is hopefully just a quick post to add a little discovery to the great Web of knowledge. I was made aware recently that it is difficult to play MIDI files in Linux, and so set myself the challenge of finding a graphical way to play any MIDI file. Whenever I had needed to play one, I had “simply” used TiMidity++ on the command line. I admit, I also had to install the FreePats patch set, which took some time to realise because the timidity package only “Recommends: freepats” so it isn’t installed automatically. Anyway, TiMidity++ supports export to Ogg Vorbis (among other things) so I very rarely had to use it more than once for any file, certainly not enough to warrant finding a GUI frontend. Out of curiousity I had looked at the GTK+ interface that came in the timidity-interfaces-extra package (and is run by typing timidity -ig on the console) but it didn’t really meet my requirements; in particular, I wouldn’t want to use one program for MIDIs and one for all other formats. So in an attempt to fulfill my challenge, I looked into xmms-midi, a plugin to enable MIDI playback in the well-known (but dated) audio player XMMS. This post, then, is mostly about a small bug in the package, and (as you’d hope) the solution I found on the Web, written by some helpful person. I had thought that just installing the xmms-midi package would be enough, and sure enough the plugin appeared in the list of XMMS plugins, and was enabled by default. I could even select a MIDI file, and it would load it and start moving the progress bar across, all the buttons functioning as expected. The only problem, and I’m not usually one to complain: there was no sound. Of course, I checked the MIDI volume was turned up on my mixer (although this is probably irrelevant to TiMidity++), that XMMS could still play other file types, and that TiMidity++ could still play MIDIs. Everything looked right. From what I could understand of the “Configure” option of the plugin in XMMS, with its little jumping lines and sliders, there was no reason music shouldn’t be coming out of my speakers. That’s when I resorted to my second, higher latency, greater capacity brain, my long-long term memory: Google. A good number of queries later and I had an answer; well, I had a page of answers, but I selected one and it was right. The page is here if you’re interested, and the query I used was “debian timidity xmms plugin no sound” for anyone who wants to learn to be a Googlemeister, or who might be looking for a page like this with a query like that. I think playmidi is NOT buggy. 2001-08-30 00:34:05 cp /usr/share/timidity/timidity.cfg /etc/timidity.cfg Bye Nil To be Debian-specific, I actually ran cp /etc/timidity/timidity.cfg /etc/, but the change is relatively obvious and only requires a search for timidity.cfg. And so with a one-line comment, written almost 5 years ago, found after an hour of searching, I had solved the problem. There is a little ironic addendum to this, though. “The lifespan of bugs” does not just refer to the fact it took me an hour to solve my problem, or the fact that it was a 5 year old problem, but to something I found when considering reporting this problem to Debian. Their developer page for the plugin says that a new version went into their “unstable” set of packages on 2006-04-29, and is set to go into the “testing” set 7 days from now. As this new version looks set to fix the bug I encountered, it seems I had only to wait one week before the computer I was attempting my little challenge on would have succeeded in just a few clicks of the mouse. Does this mean you should fix the bugs in your own software before complaining about other people’s? Trackbacks
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