Re: I (and others) can't play lilypond-generated MIDI files

[David Wright]

On Mon 17 Feb 2025 at 13:36:09 (-0500), Laura Conrad wrote:
> 
> This was originally reported by a non-technical MacOS user, so he was
> presumably using the default browser with watever default MIDI player
> that uses.
> 
> There are no error messages when I run lilypond.
> 
> I have used both timidity and aplaymidi on Linux.  'timidity test.midi"
> results in a segmentation fault.  It says:
> 
> Segmentation fault (core dumped)
> 
> But there isn't a core file.  (Maybe a "ulimit -c 0" somewhere I can't
> find?)

There may be some lines in the kernel log. I have that ulimit in my
~/.bash_profile: it's debatable how many people can make any sensible
use of a core dump—I certainly can't.

> "aplaymidi -p 14:0 score.midi" doesn't crash but hangs and doesn't play
> anything.

It "hung" here for the exact length of the MIDI file (about 4 seconds
for the output from your attached .ly file, 46 seconds for tenor.midi),
and I heard nothing. Then I got the prompt.

However, I then set up a MIDI listener—on one xterm, I typed:

  $ timidity -iA
  Requested buffer size 32768, fragment size 8192
  ALSA pcm 'default' set buffer size 33868, period size 3760 bytes
  TiMidity starting in ALSA server mode
  Opening sequencer port: 128:0 128:1 128:2 128:3

and on another, observing the above, I typed:

  $ aplaymidi -p 128:0 /tmp/tenor.midi

and heard part of "Sumer is icumen in" played very slowly.

  System: Debian 11 (bullseye)
  $ aplaymidi -V
  aplaymidi version 1.2.4
  $ timidity -v
  TiMidity++ version 2.14.0

  Package versions:
  timidity 2.14.0-8 amd64
  alsa-utils 1.2.4-1 amd64

> This worked fine for years.  It seems to be a problem not only with
> current MIDI files but with (all?) the others on my website that were
> generated years or decades ago.

Peter Chubb appears to be running timidity 2.14.0-8.3 from Debian
testing/trixie, three versions newer than my June 2018 version.
I've had no problems with 2.14.0-8, but that said, I don't run
it as a client or server for other processes. I always just type:

  timidity [options] <MIDI-filename>   (or a script does).

Cheers,
David.