midi on FC4 with timidity
October 29th, 2005 by RohanYeah! Finally got midi working on Linux (Fedora Core 4). My apologies earlier for cursing how FC4 did not support midi output while my windows installation did.
It seems I needed to get by basics clear about software synthesizers, which I did. The sound card I have is an integrated Intel card (Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM). These “consumer” cards do not have an in-built synthesizer on them. The way windows gets around this is to use its own software synthesizer.
Well… timidity does just that for Linux. Note that you may have to specify the output as alsa or jack for timidity to work. Here is how I ran it
$ timidity -Os example.mid
Now only to get the virtual keyboard working 
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February 20th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
Just thought I would leave you a note to say thanks for this blog post - saved me what could have been hours of searching to find the solution to playing MIDI files on my Dell workstation with crappy soundcard!
Came up as the first hit in Google (”fedora fc4 midi software synth”) so hopefully other people will also get the benefit.
Much appreciated - thanks