Translation(s): English - Français - Italiano
MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a standard communication protocol thats connects a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and related Sound devices for playing, editing and recording music. A single MIDI link through a MIDI cable can carry up to sixteen channels of information, each of which can be routed to a separate device or instrument. This could be sixteen different digital instruments, for example.
Contents
Software
For a full list of MIDI software, see the Multimedia page.
MIDI file MIME types are audio/x-midi, audio/x-mid, and audio/midi. The file extensions are .mid, .midi.
Timidity is a MIDI and Karaoke (.kar) player. Install the timidity and timidity-interfaces-extra packages, and run the program with the interface of your choice:
timidity -ia #text interface timidity -ig #gtk interface timidity -ik #tcl/tk interface
The fluid-soundfont-gs fluid-soundfont-gm vlc-plugin-fluidsynth packages allow you to play MIDI files in any Gstreamer-based media player or VLC. Right-click a .mid or .kar file in your FileManager, Open with..., select the /usr/bin/timidy program, and change its command line to '/usr/bin/timidity' -ia
Hardware
See the MidiHardware page to connect a musical instrument to your computer using MIDI.
MIDI systems
MIDI playback and recording is supported by the following systems and sound servers:
External links
MIDI - MIDI - Wikipedia
http://alsa.opensrc.org/AlsaMidi - AlsaMidi - ALSA Wiki
http://linuxgazette.net/issue15/midi.html - Linux and MIDI: In the beginning...