playmidi instead of tmidity [linux]

[ChrisHuebsch]

Hello,

i have a EMU10K1-Based soundcard (SB-Live!), which has hardware-midiplay. Instead of tmidity I can use "playmidi -a" to play midi-files in hardware and save on or two cpu-cycles.

I can read that in extmidi.c is a #defined EXTERNAL_PLAYER. To use playmidi, i had to change the execl-function too by adding a "-a" parameter.

Furtermore before playing any midi-song, a soundfont has to be loaded into the card by "sfxload".

I am thinking about a morge general way to specify the midi-player. What about a config-entry like
midiplayer="command -options %s"
or someting like that instead of hardcoding the command into the programm?[/code]

[Bjarni]

I guess you can try (in makefile.config)
MIDI:="playmidi -a"
I think it will work, but I'm not sure. I would like a reply with the result
of cause this needs an unmodified extmidi.c
svn revert extmidi.c
will do the trick

[ChrisHuebsch]

no, it won't work, i tried that.

the problem is, that execl needs each argument for the new process as a separate parameter.

So execl ("playmidi -a", "extmidi", filename, NULL); will not work. execl does not parse the first parameter. One might even wants to start an executable with whitespaces in the name.

execl("playmidi", "extmidi", "-a", filename, NULL); works

the system-call named "system" calls /bin/sh which parses its arguments, but i believe it won't raise SIGCHLD, but just block.

Chris

[Bjarni]

update to newest svn version and run
make upgradeconf
then edit makefile.config
MIDI:=playmidi
MIDI_ARG:=-a

and it should work

[ChrisHuebsch]

great. that will work.

thank you

[Bjarni]

minor issues are easy to fix, but we have to be aware of them

of cause this was quicker to fix, since you gave the right line. We want more of that kind of problem reports