Musical Instrument Digital Interface

By definition: MIDI, that stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, is an industry-standard electronic communications protocol that enables electronic musical instruments, computers and other equipment to communicate, control and synchronize with each other in real time. (Source Wikipedia)

MIDI does not transmit an audio signal — it simply transmits digital data such as the pitch and intensity of musical notes to play, control signals for parameters such as volume, vibrato and panning, and clock signals to set the tempo. Computer-based sequencers, can be used to record, edit and play back compositions.

The openSUSE and MIDI

The openSUSE has support for MIDI included. You can find almost all that you need to use your sound card MIDI capabilities, from device drivers to editors and sequencers. In case that your sound card doesn't provide MIDI playback there are tools like TiMidity that can play midi files or act as a server for programs that need sequencer device. TiMidity is not the only way, but it is probably the easiest one. The other reason to use it as playback device is quality of output where most of the cards may not have the best playback and nothing can be improved using better samples like with softmidi programs.

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See also

• ALSA Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
• FluidSynth is another softmidi program.
• SDB:Howto: Playing Midi files

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External links

• http://www.midi.org
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI
• http://linux-sound.org/