bsamuels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: BS> David Z Maze <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: DZM> bsamuels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: BS> I have now run out of ideas. I'm mystified why sound should work BS> whether or not the sound/emu modules are loaded. DZM> DZM> Have you tried actual "sound" (as opposed to CD audio)? Try, for DZM> example, finding a .au file, and catting it to /dev/audio. Do you get DZM> output then? BS> BS> I have now tried that and, yes, it only outputs when the sound BS> modules are loaded. However I have managed to find a midi file BS> and as I have KMidi I thought to try it. It says 'cannot access BS> /dev/sequencer' so I tried to cat the file to /dev/sequencer and I BS> get 'no such device'.
Ooh. MIDI files are a bit weird. There are three basic options: -- Feed it through the external MIDI port on your sound card. This requires some extra hardware to actually get sound (generally a joystick-port MIDI interface and an external synthesizer with a MIDI input). This should use the /dev/sequencer interface. [1] -- Feed it through the FM synthesis chip on your sound card. AFAIK, there's not a good way to make Linux do this. -- Run it through a software synthesizer; the most commonly used one seems to be Timidity (it has a Debian package). This will feed its output by default through /dev/dsp. The latter's probably going to be easiest to set up, provided you don't mind downloading the Timidity patch set (it's a big package that's pretty much needed to make Timidity work). The first should also be easy to set up if you have the prerequisite hardware. It seems like the second should be possible, but I've never figured out how to make it work, and the sound quality won't be that great anyways. BS> The device is there and it has the same ownership/mode as other BS> audio devices. I tried re-making the audio devices with MAKEDEV. BS> MAKEDEV listed the devices as they were created including BS> /dev/sequencer but I still get the message 'no such device'. The existence of a device file doesn't mean that there's anything in the kernel actually listening on the other end. (You can create arbitrary device files with mknod, but this doesn't cause drivers to exist.) Unfortunately, I don't have enough familiarity with your hardware to have any idea what driver you'd need (probably another kernel module you'd need to load). -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/ "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal." -- Abra Mitchell
