Tested in Ubuntu 10.04.

Sound patches for TiMidity++

Until recently I thought that freepats was the best (focus on the relative there, nothing against the project but it's incomplete etc.) gratis patches out there for TiMidity++ . Then I found a listing which provided a link to the "Eawpatches GUS patch set". For your reference (assuming what I got was correct of course):

% sha1sum eawpats12.tar.bz2 
3753036348661155fbf84e49bbba60229f0417c8  eawpats12.tar.bz2

I've only tested it with a few files so far, but it seems quite complete "out of the box" (some drumsets are missing (I think just a few of them) or incomplete to some degree, but it seems like there are only a few other instruments missing in some banks) and reasonable sound overall. (I would probably need to get more or better MIDI files to make a more interesting review though.)

Installation

• Unpack it to a directory of your choice.
• Backup any old timidity.cfg and belonging files (patches etc.) as necessary.
• Replace c:\timidity with /etc/timidity/ (not sure if this is correct, but anyway, nothing blew up yet :-))
• Replace c:\eawpats with /usr/share/timidity/eawpats12/ .
• Copy the eawpats12 directory you got from the tarball, and put it in /usr/share/timidity/ . Don't forget to chmod / chown it accordingly.

Small fix to that: (bug in archive)

• Go to the eawpats12 folder, and then change to gsdrum25 .
• sudo chmod a+r here to make sure revcym.pat is world readable.

Playing

Don't forget that TiMidity++ has an ncurses interface. Start it with timidity -in . (I find that the cursor is jumping all over the place, but it provides proper navigation etc. which is good.)

A better choice would be to install the timidity-interfaces-extra package in Ubuntu and use the slang interface: timidity -is . The block cursor does not jump there. However, it does have a very curious lack of options, see for yourself.

If you're using the TiMidity daemon for playback (see the Ubuntu desktop page), it needs to be restarted or so to read new settings.