Since Amarok now uses GStreamer, that supports a wide variety of different sound formats, I wonder if it was possible to make listening to MIDI files possible. GStreamer itself does support MIDI playback (even through two different plugins - timidity and wildmidi). So is this even possible?

I always wanted an ability to play MIDI files through Amarok (currently the only part of my music collection that Amarok can't play). And it's too bad, since Amarok is the best music player I have seen so far. However, it would be incredibly awesome if it was actually possible to make it happen!

I fiddled around with some packages and actually got it working! Wow!

Using openSUSE, I had to install the timidity package itself (not only the timidity libraries), and make sure the GStreamer Bad Plugins and Addons are also installed. That makes Amarok play MIDI files out of the box!

The only things I noticed is that Amarok complains about the MIDI mime-type being unexpected (but it's just a warning, since it works out correctly after all):

Code: Select all

kmimetype filetype guessing failed for /home/user/test.mid

And also the configuration for Timidity is quite awkward... It uses patches that either you have to write yourself (which is not feasible for large soundfonts), or there should be a tool that does it automatically... The default soundfonts are not very true to the original, although it is part of MIDI charm, the music is different all the time

Amarok plays midi out of the box. My system: OpenSUSE 12.1 + KDE 4.7.2
Installed Amarok 2.5.0.19.1 (delivered by Packman) GStreamer backend. I installed all of the Packman packages of Gstreamer including plugins and add ons. Besides that some GStreamer packages delivered by OBS.

Also installed Timidity, lib Timidity and some soundfonts. Besides that Xine andf Xine codecs. Well I don't exactly know if and how all these packages are related with each other, but Amarok plays midi. Weird thing: I can't get Timidity and KMid playing midi. Both are complaining about missing ALSA-sequencer backend while I've installed Alsa. KMid and Timidity even won't start up.