Friday, November 21, 2008

Milena Velba Got Bigger



few years ago I bought this keyboard MIDI (MK-3701) on ebay. It is purely a MIDI keyboard, speaker and generates no sound. To use it must be connected to a MIDI port as having the old sound cards.


The first option was to directly connect the keyboard to the OPL3 synthesizer of the card (by rosegarden
    ). But for some reason not working.
  • The second option was to use a software synthesizer (timidity
  • ) and use the PCM output. The problem is the CPU usage (is a PC with ISA bus ...) and the sound quality (this card seems to work in 8 bits).
  • The option works best for me is to use my new laptop to synthesize sound. For this I have to send the MIDI over the network (at first I tried rosegarden and
  • multimidicast ). The simplest and most efficient way to send MIDI events on the network is to use ALSA tools:
  • First run this on the old PC that has the keyboard:


aseqnet & # Launch MIDI server network
aseqdump-l # List of available devices (16:0 Avance Logic, 128:0 Net Client)
aconnect 16:0 128:0 # Connect the keyboard to input MIDI server .
 

then run it on the laptop: 192.168.1.10 aseqnet

& IP # Connect to the MIDI server
timidity-iA-OS1-B 2.3 & # Launch the software synthesizer (Note that you No assigned 128:0)
aseqdump-l # List of available devices (Net Client 129:0) 129:0 128:0 aconnect
 client # Connect MIDI synthesizer 


After this I can already play the piano with low latency and high sound quality.
If something goes wrong the first thing is to check that the sound is being sent over the network: Run both commands
aseqnet
and to measure traffic on the network pusar keys (should rise to ~ 1 kb / s).