TiMidity MCD 2.10.2 About TiMidity -------------- TiMidity plays MIDI and Module (.MOD) files. It does it in software without depending on any hardware MIDI support your south card might have. Sound quality can be much higher because it limited by your CPU's power and memory rather then your sound card's power and memory. TiMidity usually comes as a stand alone player. TiMidity MCD is a special version that installs as part of OS/2 Multimedia system so that most applications that played MIDI files through your sound card before, can now play MIDIs through TiMidity at a higher quality. This includes the Multimedia Workplace Shell objects and the Plug-in Pack for Netscape. Applications that use RTMIDI, or DOS and Win3.1 applications cannot use it. Installation for new users -------------------------- 0. The emx run type library is required. It is available here: http://ftp-os2.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/dev/emx/v0.9d/emxrt.zip 1. Unzip the archive into a directory. 2. Run Multimedia Application Install. In OS/2 Warp 4 this is in the Install/Remove folder of the System Setup. You can also execute it by typing "minstall" from the command line. 3. Select the directory you uncompressed the archive into. 4. Click the Install button. If it crushes with a SYS3175 try again, but move the window part way off the screen before pressing the Install button. 5. DO NOT open Multimedia Setup before rebooting. 6. Edit the config.sys and add line that says: SET TIMIDITYDIR=path where path this the location where you uncompressed the archive into. 7. Reboot. 8. Open Multimedia Setup. In OS/2 Warp 4 this is in the System Setup. 9. If installation was successful you should now have a tab labeled TiMidity. You can now set TiMidity as the default sequencer (sequencer basically means MIDI player) by checking the "Default Sequencer device" checkbox. If you have another sequencer you have to remove the file associations from it before you can add them to TiMidity. To do this click on the tab for the other sequencer and click the plus or press Page Down to see what associations it has and remove them. Sometime the Remove button will be greyed out even if you've got one selected to remove. What you can do is add a random type or extension and the Remove button will activate. You can then remove the one you just added and any others you want. Once you got all the type and extensions associations removed from your old sequencer you can go to TiMidity tab, go to the next page and add associations for the MIDI type and add the extensions MID, MOD, S3M, XM and any other extension that you have for MOD files. 10. Reboot. TiMidity MCD will now be used play any MIDI and MOD files on your system. From the Workplace shell you and use Open as|Play (the default) or Open as|Player. The Open as|Editor option does not work. To play MIDI files TiMidity need patches. MIDI files only contains the notes, not the sounds of the instruments. The patch files contain the sounds of the instruments. TiMidity MCD only comes with patch files for two instruments, piano and guitar, so if you play a MIDI file those are the only instruments you can hear. If you download some random MIDI from the Internet you're hear little or nothing. However TiMidity comes with some sample MIDIs that only need the piano and guitar patches. The are in under the midi directory. OS/2 comes with a selection of sample MIDIs some of which only use the piano patch. They are: BLUESINF.MID ETUDEE.MID FANTAISI.MID FURELIST.MID MLSONOTA.MID NOCTURND.MID NOCTURNE.MID POLONAIS.MID REVERIE.MID SANMARTA.MID SONATAA.MID SOATACA.MID SONATACR.MID WALTZC.MID WALTZD.MID WALTZE.MID Now you're going to need some patch sets so you can hear MIDIs with more then just one instrument. TiMidity 2.8.1 supports both GUS (Gravis UltraSound) patch sets and Creative Labs SoundFont. GUS patch sets are available from my home page and the TiMidity++ home page. See the links below. To install patches you must edit the timidity.cfg file. The file cfg.txt contains details on the format of the timidity.cfg file. MOD files do not require patch sets because the instrument sounds are included with the files. Installation for existing users ------------------------------- 1. Unzip the archive into a temporary directory. 2. Copy timidity.dll over your existing timidity.dll in the \mmos2\dll directory. If the file is locked you can do this step after you reboot (see step 6). 3. Edit the config.sys and add line that says: SET TIMIDITYDIR=path where path this the location of your current TiMidity directory, such as C:\TIMIDITY. Basically it has to be the directory where you store your timidity.cfg file. 4. Open Multimedia Setup and click on the TiMidity tab. Select the next page by click on the plus or pressing Page Down to see the current associations. Add MOD, MOD, S3M, XM and any other extension that you have for MOD files to the current extensions. 5. Reboot. 6. Do step 2 if you didn't do it already. TiMidity should be now upgraded. Sound quality should be better then it was before. You also can now play MOD files as well as MIDI files and you have the option of using SoundFonts as well as GUS patches. TiMidity no longer generates the C:\TIM.LOG file by default. Playing MOD file from Netscape ------------------------------ The Netscape Plugin Pack is not aware of OS/2 Multimedia new found ability to play MOD files with the MIDI subsystem. I have included a file which fixes this problem. To install this you must shut down Netscape and go to the netscape/programs/plugins directory. Make a backup copy of the file NPOS2MID.DLL and copy the NPOS2MID.DLL form the TiMidity archive. When you restart Netscape files with the extension MOD will be associated with OS/2 Multimedia MIDI PlugIn. If you're interested, I'll explain how I did this: The Netscape plugin pack installs one large dll, NPNULOS2.DLL and several tiny dlls (NPOS2MID.DLL, NPOS2AUD.DLL and NPOS2VID.DLL) into the plugins directory. NPNULOS2.DLL does all the work and the other DLLs simply forward requests to it. The only thing that the DLLs contains are a series of resources that define the MIME types, description, file extension and some copyright information. I was able to use Universal Resource Editor (URE) that comes with the OS/2 Toolkit to modify the resources and add a new file extension for the NPOS2MID.DLL. I tried using some of the shareware resource extractors, but I was unable to get rc.exe to compile the resources they extracted. Problems -------- Using the WPS Player can cause the WPS to restart without displaying an error. If you use the WPS Play option, by double clicking directly on the Midi file this will work and from then on the WPS Player will work, too. This may not be problem with TiMidity and it may even happen with the standard MIDI player. If someone wants to test that it would help me. If you run MMCheck from Theta Band Software after installing TiMidity MCD you will get some warnings about key MCDDRIVER and key EXTNAMES, but these are not really problems. MMCheck expects the standard MIDI MCD, not TiMidity. If you get errors or warnings about something else in the Sequencer driver section that you're concerned about, let me know. If you're having a problem with TiMidity MCD please email me at the address at the end of this file. Please give me the steps you did that caused the problem and a debug log. To create a debug log add a line in your config.sys that says SET TIMIDITYDEBUG=file where file is the path and filename for the debug file, such as C:/TIM.LOG. After you reboot when you try and use TiMidity it will record it's activities. The log will be cleared every time you restart the application that uses TiMidity. You should be aware the the time I have to work on TiMidity is very limited and sporadic. If you find a problem it could be a very long time before I get around to fixing it. Luckally TiMidity is open source software, so other people can still work on it, even if I can't. Links ----- TiMidity MCD for OS/2 Homepage (the source code will be here): http://www.reamined.on.ca/doconnor/timidity.html TiMidity++ Homepage: http://www.goice.co.jp/member/mo/timidity/ Darwin O'Connor doconnor@reamined.on.ca