Hi Folks, Pete wrote: >> Q. Why can't I play music files? My soundcard is fine, I have >> the MIDI patches but "PLAYANY",...well, just DOESN'T! > A: PLANY will play any sound file through the SoundBlaster. > Currently supported sound types: > SoundBlaster .VOC > Sun/NeXT/DEC .AU > Windows .WAV > Sounder/Soundtools .SND > Amiga .8SVX .IFF > In addition, PLANY will attempt to detect and play the sound > samples contained in Amiga .MOD files. > However I don't think this belongs in the FAQ since the answer is from > plany.txt that you actually have (so we can already say: RTFM <g>). > MIDI patches can be used with Cubic Player (in my experience one of the few > MIDI players that actually plays MIDI on standard soundcards). > You also need to make changes in mime.cfg, and Arachne currently don't > support playing EMBEDed files (files loaded when you visit a webpage) from > the Internet. All true. May I also add my 5 cents worth ? There are some MIDI player choices for Arachne music lovers. Cubic Player - I needed a lot of help from Glenn McCorkle to get Cubic to function on my rig, the MIDI patches (GUS) take up a lot of disk space, and Cubic did lock-up with some regularity, requiring a cold boot. It would have to be called as an external application by editing MIME.CFG. FreeCDP Player - there is an APM for this player from Florian Xaver. It plays MIDI, MP3 and a number of other formats. I found this player to be the most reliable, and with the best reproduction for MIDIs. It is the one I use all the time in Arachne. It has its MIDI patches built-in. I have also set MIME.CFG to pass MP3 to this player. CNDMIDI - there is (was ?) an APM for this one, too. Written by John P Tomany, it does work if you have enough orthodox memory. You need to load the drivers first. The reproduction is pretty ordinary, but it does have the advantage of playing MIDIs without taking control of your whole system - you can still scroll down the page. PLAY.EXE - If you have a SoundBlaster soundcard, you will find this player in the SB directory. You would need to edit MIME.CFG to call this as an external application. On my rig, the reproduction is poor, and the tempo of playback varies according to the complication of the MIDI sequence. I have used this by calling a batch file from MIME.CFG. It is probably the worst choice, in my (musician's) opinion. While it is not possible, at the current state of development, to play MIDIs embedded in WWW - based pages, it is perfectly OK to play MIDIs from web-pages saved to your hard drive. It also works just fine for embedded MIDI files, provided that the HTML code has been written with both <embed>..</embed> and <noembed>...</noembed> tags. Then the embedded MIDI is treated in much the same way as an image file, and simply "processed" by Arachne = played. To test this, you could try out the zipped Folk Song collection at: http://home.t-online.de/home/vertellnix/msb/download/songs.zip (423 kb) or email me privately and I will send you a single embedded MIDI/page pair. Regards, Ron Ron Clarke http://homepages.valylink.net.au/~ausreg/music.html -- This mail was written by user of Arachne, the Ultimate DOS Internet Client
