KMid Help


KMid 0.4
Antonio Larrosa Jimenez (antlarr@arrakis.es)
30-12-97 . Malaga (Spain)


What's KMid ?

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 :-).

Features

  • KMid has a nice interface to display karaoke text
  • Powerful Midi Mapper that will make people with no general midi synths happier than ever :-).
  • Drag & drop so you can drop in KMid any midi file from a kfm window.
  • Customizable fonts for karaoke text to be displayed.
  • Supports the two standards to introduce lyrics in midi files, that is, lyrics or text events (and guess which one a song uses automatically)
  • Session Management. If a song is playing while you logout from KDE, the next time you login, the same song will start playing !
  • Can play some broken midi files which make other players core dump !
  • Can open gzipped files just as any other midi file.
  • Consumes approximately 0.1% of my CPU (depends on the complexity of the song)
  • Supports external midi synths, AWE cards, and GUS (needs the Linux Ultrasound Project driver and gusd installed).
  • Runs on Linux and FreeBSD (perhaps also other unices ...)

    How can I open a song?

    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 ! :-) ...

    How do I start playing a song?

    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

    What's all that about text and lyrics events ?

    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.

    How do I play a song from a specified second?

    Start playing the song and then press with the middle button of your mouse on the slider

    Where can I download more karaoke songs from?

    These are two of my favourite sites:

    One with lots of very good files :

    Kenny Bellew's Midi/Karaoke Collection

    And the next is a very good site with karaoke files in Spanish, made by a friend of mine :

    Jhames Soft

    What's a Midi Mapper?

    If 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.

    How can I use a mapper with my synthesizer?

    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 :


    [Midimapper]
    Loadfile=**absolute path to map file**

    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


    3.- Please send me a postcard from where you live to :

    Antonio Larrosa
    Rio Arnoya. 10 5B
    29006 Malaga
    (Spain)
    This would keep me happy and you will also enter in the postcard senders of the PEOPLE file