no playback on Kubuntu
Submitted by Raichu on October 9, 2008 - 4:54am.
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I just installed "mscore" on Kubuntu using Adept Manager. I got version 0.9.1 (perhaps you need to update the repository...?).
It starts up OK and I created a score with a piano track. However, there is no audio playback. There is no play button and Display-->Play Panel is greyed out.
Can anyone help me out? Is something missing from the installation?
One thing I should point out, Adept finished downloading all the dependencies but then it hung during installation and when I killed it my computer crashed.
I thought of running it from the command line and I got these messages as it started up.
Does that give any clue as to how to fix it?
Seems that a file is missing : /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2
If you need piano playback only, you may try to go back to the default embedding soundfont.
Read Soundfont for more information.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=826493
I tried installing fluidsynth plus sound files (they're big, had to do it overnight) and playback started working now. There are still some problems, however.
1. I still get some errors on startup, Do I need to do anything about this?
2. I tried to open some midi files and some of them opened fine but some crashed mscore. I think what they have in common is that they have embedded lyrics. Any midi file with embedded lyrics crashes mscore with the following message:
Is this feature supported? Is there anything I can try?
3. Playback of the other midi files happens but the relative volume of the instruments does not seem right. Some instruments drown out others. When I used to play the same midi files on Windows Media Player they sounded OK. Help, anyone please!!
You can help to make a better midi import for mscore by preparing a short test file which shows an bug. I'm collecting such files for debugging and regression testing.
MScore is not a good midi player because the imported midi is heavily modified (aligned and quantized etc.). In the current version the articulation is completley lost (velocity).
For a future version i'm working on this to retain as much information as possible from a midi file by transforming it to score notation.
You can grab a midi with embedded lyrics here
http://raichu.110mb.com/rwp/music/topaz.mid
It was produced with Anvil Studio.
Sorry I don't have a MS Windows system any more to run Anvil so I can't edit it into a smaller file.
If anyone else out there can do it...
The default volume for each instrument is set by the SoundFont. Some have better balance than others. You can use Display → Mixer to adjust volumes individually.
Sorry if this is a little off topic, but since MuseScore won't play midi files properly, I tried installing kmid as it purports to be a midi player. It appears to go through the motions of processing midi files but no sound comes out. There is no error message.
Does anyone know what I might be doing wrong?