On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 12:07 AM, William W. Austin <airedad(a)att.net> wrote:
My wife composes, and for playback she has used an Audigy2 PCI card
in
her desktop machine for years. That computer is beyond it's last legs
now, and her new one has only PCIE slots. (Yes she uses Linux for her
composing and playback.)
The problem is that she uses the Midi feature of that card and has
sound fonts that she loads (about 126 MB in size) into it. She has
given up trying to find one and has asked me to help... but so far I've
struck out.
Does she just play back MIDI files with her own custom SoundFont
files? MIDI playback these days is usually done completely in
software, it's hard to find a card that does it anymore.
The Fedora repositories contain a software MIDI implementation called
fluidsynth. You can install it with `yum install fluidsynth`. Once
it's installed, it can be run in server mode. This exposes a MIDI
sound device to other applications that appears identical to to a
hardware MIDI playback device.
Just run something like:
fluidsynth --server --audio-driver=alsa -o audio.alsa.device=hw:0
/path/to/her/soundfont.sf2
And a MIDI device with the soundfont she wants is created, which she
can use in all her software just like she used to use with her real
live card in the past.
Are there ANY PCIE sound which is roughly the equivalent of the
Audigy
2 cards? I won't say "money is no object", but I'm approaching the
point where cost is less important than finding such a card if on
exists.
Of course, if she needs to plug a MIDI instrument in, you can't just
do that in software. ;-)
Unfortunately PCI-e cards that do MIDI are a rare, expensive breed,
and most that do seem to have a bunch of other stuff she probably
doesn't need. She might be stuck with a USB or FireWire device. :-(
-T.C.