[CM] midi to sound file

Noel Bush noel@x-31.com
Sat, 16 Aug 2003 22:26:04 -0400


I apologize -- I know this must be a FAQ, but I can't find a
satisfactory answer anywhere that works for me.  I'm using the cmdist,
Redhat 9/Rawhide.  I have an Audigy SB card.

Very simple: I want to capture the sound produced by MIDI playback into
a soundfile.  The best idea that I can piece together is that I should
be able to use Jack to accomplish this.  The score itself is composed in
NoteEdit, so I've tried playing it from that, as well as (exported to
MIDI) from Rosegarden, MusE, timidity and playmidi.  I've started the
Jack server like so:

jackstart -d alsa -H -m -d hw:0

and then I've tried various jackrec command lines like:

jackrec -f ec3.wav -d 10 "rosegarden:out_1"
jackrec -f ec3.wav -d 10 "MusE:output1"

...and so forth.  Jackrec dutifully operates for the given duration, but
the soundfile produced is empty (10 seconds of silence).

I have, uh, messed around with the connections in "alsa-patch-bay -d
jack", although to no avail.  I do see entries appearing for MusE,
rosegarden, etc. appear when those applications launch.

(I have also tried the "bounce to file" option in MusE -- not sure if
that's what it's meant for, but it hasn't produced anything for me
either.)

I'm sure I must be missing something very elementary here.  Out of this
whole wonderful collection of software, there's got to be a very simple
way to accomplish this.  Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance.