Audio Recording

This is a tutorial on how to play midi (or enable MIDI playback) in Ubuntu Linux environment.The default installation of Linux provides you the following audio/video programs: Rhythmbox Music Player and Movie player. Of course, the above players won’t be able to play MIDI properly and it requires tricky and heavy file size plug-ins to be installed. This tutorial will teach you the best and easiest way to play MIDI files using TiMidity MIDI Sequencer.

Step1: Go to Applications – Ubuntu Software Center
Step2: In the search box, type Timidity , you should see an entry very similar or the same as the one provided in the screenshot below:

Step3: Click the yellow arrow to install that software. Ubuntu will then start downloading that software and automatically installs it to your computer after downloading.

Step4: Once the above process is done, go to Applications — Sound & Video , you should see the software installed.

Step5: Try playing a MIDI files, you can download this sample MIDI file here to your desktop: http://www.pluto.dti.ne.jp/~araki/amazingmidi/sample.mid

Step6: To play MIDI files, (supposing the file is in your Ubuntu Desktop), you need to right click on the file and then select “Open with TiMidity ++ MIDI Sequencer”.

The MIDI files should be played without any issues. This is how the MIDI player should look like in Ubuntu:

Benefits of working in MIDI: MIDI files is very important for music professionals and songwriters. You will be able to work with musical notes very easily using MIDI. Other advantages of MIDI includes , having to convert MIDI files to sheet notes very easily; lots of great open source music writing software like MuseScore supports MIDI files. Most classical music in public domain are conviently converted to MIDI and you can easily transport and download files from the internet because the file size is relatively very low compared to MP3 and WAV format.

Troubleshooting MIDI related issues: There are exceptional cases where you cannot still play MIDI files despite having successfully installed the above software. Bear in mind that troubleshooting sound related problems in Ubuntu can be tricky and challenging. So follow the suggestions below at your own risks. If you have problems with MIDI playback, it is suggested you will follow through this following guides:http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic83868.html,http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-30963.html,http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1434061,http://art.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=807264. The following suggestions should be able to solve your problem, if you still having issues with playing MIDI in your Ubuntu computer, please post a comment and I will help you to troubleshoot it.