KMid is a midi/karaoke player, that uses /dev/sequencer to play a midi file through an external synth, GUS card or AWE card. (I hope to include FM support in the near future). At the same time that the song is played, lyrics are displayed in a beautiful window so that the user can sing or just follow the letter :-).
You can open a song by pressing File | Open ... , or by dragging the file from a kfm
window and dropping it in the kmid window. You can also pass a song to kmid in the command line.
Hey that's easy, let's go to more difficult questions ! :-) ...
You have three ways to start playing a song, by selecting it from the menu in Song|Play , by clicking on the play button of the toolbar, or by pressing the Space key of the keyboard. Songs will automatically start playing if you drop it in KMid's window
There are two methods to store lyrics in a song, by using "Text events" or "lyrics events", some songs use the first, some the second, some use both of them, and some don't include lyrics :-) . KMid lets you choose which events to display, and even better, it has an option to automagically select the type of events that a song uses, so that you don't have to change the type manually.
Start playing the song and then press with the middle button of your mouse on the slider
These are two of my favourite sites:
One with lots of very good files :
Kenny Bellew's Midi/Karaoke CollectionAnd the next is a very good site with karaoke files in Spanish, made by a friend of mine :
Jhames SoftIf you have a synthesizer that doesn't complain with the General Midi standard, and you play a midi file with it, you will hear a piano playing the track that should be played by a flute and a drum playing the track that should be played by a piano. So you need some method to map sounds to different ones, this is what a Midi Mapper does. You can specify what values have to be passed to your synth so that it emulates a GM synth.
There isn't a graphical tool to configure it (yet) so you should
edit the map file by hand :-(.
Once you have done a map, select Options | Midi Setup ... and press on the
Browse button to select the map file you have created.
Another method is to add two lines like these to ~/.kde/share/config/kmidrc :
In my case I have :
[Midimapper]
Loadfile=yamaha790.map
That is because if you don't specify an absolute path, kmid will look in the standard place for map files, in /opt/kde/share/apps/kmid/maps
So if you, like me, have a yamaha790 you are of luck, just use the included file. But if you have a different synthesizer that isn't General Midi compliant, then you will have to make your own mapper
To do so, you should copy the file yamaha790.map to work on it, without changing the original. Suppose that it is mysynth.map (though it should be "model of your synth".map) Then you should edit the kmidrc file as above, pointing Loadfile to this copy on which you will work. Now you are ready to start.
... but I'm not, this version is not finished so I don't think that anybody will notice a small lack of help ;-) So please, follow your instinct and if you have any question, send it to me at : antlarr@arrakis.es
And remember three things :
1.- You should encourage the author to continue working on kmid,
because he has better things to do than programming kmid if nobody uses
it :-)
2.- You can download the latest version at :
http://www.arrakis.es/~rlarrosa/kmid.html