TiMidity

This notice was posted on September 24, 1998
This archive of Timidity will not be removed.

Page discontinued

Tuukka Toivonen's home page and the TiMidity page have been discontinued. I'm sorry if this leaves an aching void in your life, but it's become obvious that I'll never have time to work on TiMidity again, and since our ISP started charging for overseas traffic, I decided to just take down the by now years-out-of-date distribution page.

If you'd like to continue hacking on TiMidity, feel free. I'm hereby extending the TiMidity license agreement: you can now select the most convenient license for your needs from (1) the GNU GPL, (2) the GNU LGPL, or (3) the Perl Artistic License. The source can be found lodged in dusty corners of the web; look for timidity-0.2i.tgz on your favorite search engine.

Tuukka Toivonen

General information

TiMidity is a MIDI to WAVE converter (MIDI renderer) that uses Gravis Ultrasound-compatible patch files to generate digital audio data from General MIDI files. The audio data can be played through an audio device or stored on disk. On a fast machine, music can be played in real time. TiMidity is free software, distributed under the GNU General Public License.

What you need to run TiMidity

You need a fast computer, or lots of disk space and patience. You really should have a 16-bit audio device, although TiMidity can generate uLaw or linear 8-bit data as well. You'll get the best performance with one of the following operating systems:

Linux or FreeBSD with the VoxWare sound driver
HP-UX with the HP network audio server
SunOS or Solaris with /dev/audio
DEC OSF/1 with MMS support
Microsoft Windows NT or 95
MS-DOS
MacOS

Porting to other systems should be fairly simple, and modifications will be accepted for inclusion in the standard release.

More information

Gape at the features.
Find out what's changed recently.
Read up on our future plans.
Read the installation instructions.
Glance at the Frequently Asked Questions list.
When all else fails, open up the manual. Or print out the PostScript version.

Where to get a copy

Why, here!

More patches and MIDI files

To appreciate General Midi files, you'll need a full General Midi instrument set. Here are some places to look:

Vincent Pagel's home page

Vincent Pagel has a wonderful collection of MIDI files, sorted by type, as well as a complete General Midi patch set. This is also the home of Motif TiMidity.

Midia FTP site

Midia is another software-only MIDI player. It runs on SGI machines only, but a TiMidity-compatible, eight-megabyte, GM instrument set can be found on the Midia FTP site archive.cs.umbc.edu. Thanks to Thomas Nhan for pointing this out!

Cubic Player sites

Cubic Player is a MS-DOS program that plays not only MIDI but MOD, XM, and related formats as well. The MIDI rendering uses GUS-compatible patches, which are useful with TiMidity. Some can be found on these sites:

Cubic home page
MAZ (e.g. Cubic and patches)
GUS patches

Ultrasound FTP sites

Patches and MIDI files can also be found on these Ultrasound FTP sites:

MIDI links

There are many MIDI-related sites on the Web, containing software, files, and information. Rather than compiling a huge list of links here, I think I'll just point you to one.

If you're looking for MIDI files, try Standard MIDI Files on the Net.

Tuukka Toivonen <tt@cgs.fi>