.mid. They contain sequencing information, that is, information on when to play what instrument in what way, etc. Depending on your hardware (and maybe the software you use to play them), the sound might be awesome, or it might be downright crappy.
mp (a command-line MIDI file player) and xmp (an XView based MIDI file player). You will need the SlingShot extensions to use xmp. It also contains other programs for playing Adagio scores.
mp can also play MOD files (see section Modules for more information on modules).
mp, but it might prevent someone from using it for `real' work. It also starts up relatively slowly.
lee@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu).
xmp binary segfaults in a X11R6 environment (XFree86 3.1.1, libc 4.7.2). The mp binary works fine.
-lfl switch at the end of SHROBJ and XMPOBJ in the Makefile. This is to link in the flex library, which is not linked in by default. Then follow the installation instructions. And don't forget to have XView and the SlingShot extensions installed if you want to compile xmp.
mp on a Sound Blaster 16, though probably won't be much different on a GUS). However, it suffers from high CPU loads. It plays MIDI by first converting MIDI to WAV and then plays the WAV (you can also convert a MIDI file to a WAV file without playing if you want). This is the reason for its CPU intensive nature.
timidity for more information.
timidity can be found at http://www.clinet.fi/~toivonen/timidity/. This page also contains a link to a small library of GUS patches. The Motif version can be found at http://www.loria.fr/~pagel.
titoivon@snakemail.hut.fi).
xplaymidi and splaymidi).
$ splaymidi foo.mid; stty sane
laredo@gnu.ai.mit.edu or laredo@ix.netcom.com).
.mod. There are many other extensions depending on what format they are in.
-mono option.
Marc.Espie@ens.fr).
-s to enable stereo, -b to enable 16 bit output, and -f to set the sampling frequency. However, the sound output is worse than tracker (some noise), so I recommend using tracker instead of s3mod for playing ordinary MOD files (unless you have an underpowered machine). It has a much smaller CPU load compared to tracker.
jeske@uiuc.edu), but you can do anything you want with it (except that you can't claim you wrote it).
robinson@cnj.digex.net).
gzip, lharc, unzip, and unarj installed. It cannot play Powerpacked modules or modules packed with some Amiga composers ("PACK" signature).
mech@df.lth.se or d91mn@efd.lth.se).
-m option (for mono output) if you need a simple way to lower the CPU load.
mikmak@via.nl). The Unix version has a lot of modifications by Steve McIntyre (sam1007@cam.ac.uk). This is shareware that has to be registered if you want to use it commercially. You also need permission to redistribute it commercially (non-commercial redistribution does not need such permission).
tracker.
-l option. It uses only 8 bit sound output (as of version 0.1).
toru@jms.jeton.or.jp).
djg@djghome.demon.co.uk).
.mpg (so if there is a file with this extension that can't be played by a MPEG video player, it's probably an audio stream), layer II usually have .mp2, and layer III usually have .mp3. The audio compression is pretty good. A two megabyte layer II MPEG audio file will probably take up 25 megabytes for a raw PCM sample file with the same quality.
maplay).
-l or -r option), instead of the default stereo.
configuration.sh.
#! /bin/sh
mailto:bading@cs.tu-berlin.de).
maplay can be found at ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/sound/players/maplay1_2.tar.gz.
sox, you'll probably just get noise because the word order in the PCM samples is not right (at least on Intel platforms). You need to give sox the option -x to solve this problem. But there are some players that don't have to be told that the word order is wrong, so you might not have to worry about this.
sox and playing a 44.1 kHz stereo sample).
$ l3dec foo.mp3 -sto | play -t raw -x -u -w -c 2 -r 44100 -
-r is the sample rate of the audio stream, and the number after -c depends on whether it is mono or stereo (or even quad). If this looks too complicated, you can use something like a shell script or an alias. Or you can use mp3play (found at ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/sound/players/mp3play.tar.gz), which sets all the options and plays it for you (mp3play includes l3dec and uses wavplay, which is also included).
sox man page:
These appear to be very similar to IFF files, but not the same. They are the native sound file format of Windows 3.1. Obviously, Windows 3.1 is of such incredible importance to the computer industry that it just had to have its own sound file format.
.wav.
af1@irz.inf.tu-dresden.de), and the current implementation is by Warren W. Gay (bx249@freenet.toronto.on.ca or wwg@ica.net).
wavplay. It too has an X Window interface for playing and recording in WAV format. However, it also has some editing capabilities and can add effects.
fishwj@ee.port.ac.uk).
play, however, it plays the sound (the play application in the Sound HOWTO probably refers to this). It supports raw (no header) binary and textual data, IRCAM Sound Files, Sound Blaster .voc, SPARC .au (w/header), Mac HCOM, PC/DOS .sou, Sndtool, and Sounder, NeXT .snd, Windows 3.1 RIFF/WAV, Turtle Beach .smp, CD-R, and Apple/SGI AIFF and 8SVX formats
sbdsp.c from
if (abuf_size < 4096 || abuf_size > 65536) {
if (abuf_size < 1 || abuf_size > 65536) {
cbagwell@mwsun026.aud.alcatel.com) (based on the latest gamma version of the original sox) can be found at ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/sound/convert/sox-11gamma-cb2.tar.gz.
ijackson@gnu.ai.mit.edu), which disables the feature that needs the setuid bit.
davidm@gh.cs.usyd.edu.au).
cat, the sometimes overused concatenating utility, has to do with playing sounds. I'll show a use of it through an example.
$ cat sample.voc > /dev/dsp
$ cat sample.wav > /dev/dsp
$ cat sample.au > /dev/audio
cat of an .au file to /dev/audio will usually work, and if you're lucky enough that the file has the correct byte order (for your platform) etc., a cat of a sound file that uses PCM samples (like .wav or .voc) to /dev/dsp might even sound right.
cat. It might be useful, for example, if you have a sound file that none of your programs recognize, and you know that it uses PCM samples, then you might be able to get a very approximate idea on how it sounds like this way (if you're lucky).