This file will attempt to explain how to install the patch set, install

TiMidity, use TiMidity to play midi, and use TiMidity to write to a wav file.
This will be written mostly from a Win32 user's point of view, since that is
what I mostly run TiMidity in, and I get more questions pertaining to this
than to Unix related installation problems.

I was going to split the timidity usage portion off into it's own TiMidity++
FAQ, but that's going to have to wait for another release. I didn't want to
hold up releasing the better instruments just because I hadn't gotten around
to writing new docs :)

Sections of this document:

A INSTALLING THE PATCH SET

B INSTALLING TIMIDITY
B' EXAMPLE WIN32 INSTALLATION PROCEDURE
B'' POSSIBLE DIFFICULTIES GETTING WIN32 GUI TO WORK
C FLAGS THAT AFFECT HOW TIMIDITY RUNS
D MORE USAGE ADVICE
E MORE WIN32 GUI ISSUES (maybe other GUI's too?):
F HOW TO OUTPUT TO A WAV FILE
G IF YOU /STILL/ HAVE PROBLEMS WITH ANYTHING

A) INSTALLING THE PATCH SET

Get rar or unrar for the platform you are using. I use the win32 console
version, which works exactly the same as the Linux rar.

************************* NOTE TO UNIX USERS !!!! *************************

Be sure to use rar/unrar >= 2.50. Versions earlier than this have a bug in
how file permissions are set on files that span multiple rar volumes. This
results in several instruments having all of their permission flags cleared.
Timidity can not read them and therefore claims they do not exist. If you
see this happening, and are using an older version of rar, get the new
version and it should solve the problem.
*****************************************************************************

To extract an entire archive set, extract the .rar file and it will
automaticly extract the other rars in the set as well, handling the files
which span multiple rars. The patch sets and any updates should all be
extracted in the directory which you will put all the patches in. This could
be c:\eawpats, or anywhere else you want. Extract the archives in the
following order:

1) extract eawpats*.rar
2) extract any updates sequentially by update number

Any updates will overwrite files from the original distribution or previous
updates.
B) INSTALLING TIMIDITY

Get the latest TiMidity from the TiMidity++ web site,

www.goice.co.jp/member/mo/timidity, or from Richard's site,
www.stardate.bc.ca/timidity.htm (usually has current src)

If you are using Linux, get the latest src and compile it up. You'll want
to be sure to use the --enable-ncurses flag in the configure script if you
want to use the ncurses interface. If you want to compile it under Win32,
get cygwin, mingw32, and pdcurses (pdcurses 2.4 beta is the most stable, 2.4
final seems to have introduced some bugs). Have fun installing the compiler
and building everything :) For Win32 users, it's simplest to get the latest
binaries from the TiMidity++ page. Richard should also have a console mode
Win32 binary available which is compiled with C-Spline interpolation,
resulting in higher quality at the expense of CPU time.

Put the timidity program wherever you want it, say c:\timidity. Now move
the timidity.cfg file which comes with my patch set into this directory.
Leave the other .cfg files where they are, in the patches directory. There
are two paths in the timidity.cfg file which you need to have set correctly.
These are the paths to the timidity directory, and to the patch directory.
Use the "dir" statement in the timidity.cfg file to set these. There are
comments in the file which tell you this. The timidity.cfg file which comes
with the patch set has these set to c:\timidity and c:\eawpats. The "dir"
statements basicly create the path environment that timidity uses when it
searches for patches and .cfg files. Thus, if you put any patches or .cfg
files in the c:\timidity dir, these will be used ahead of any in the patches
directory. It's best to avoid possible confusion and just keep all patches
and .cfg files in the patches directory.

The mt-32.cfg and proteus.cfg are only to be included in timidity.cfg if you

need to play an MT-32 or Proteus2 midi. They will replace the normal
instrument mappings with ones to fit those particular pieces of hardware, so
normal GM midi will sound very strange if you try to play them while you
have those .cfg files included. Only include sndfont.cfg if you are going
to be using soundfonts, and you'll have to edit it to tell it what your
soundfont is.

B') EXAMPLE WIN32 INSTALLATION PROCEDURE

c:\timidity extract the timidity zip here

c:\eawpats extract all of my patches here
c:\timidity\timidity.cfg copy the timidity.cfg file here

For those of you who need a step-by-step example, here is what to type in
the DOS box (it is harder to describe how to do things in a GUI):

c: #go to the C: drive

cd \ #to to the root directory
pkunzip c:\timidity-w32-2.9.1.zip #the zip makes it's own dir
mkdir eawpats #make the patch directory
cd eawpats #go there
rar x c:\eawpats10.rar #extract the patch set
copy timidity.cfg c:\timidity #copy the timidity.cfg file

That's it. It should all be installed and configured properly now, assuming
you put things in the default locations given above.

B'') POSSIBLE DIFFICULTIES GETTING WIN32 GUI TO WORK

It has come to my attention that certain versions of the Win32 GUI (may or
may not still do this, I don't use it enough to know) *REQUIRE* timidity.cfg
to be in c:\windows\timidity.cfg when you run it for the first time. After
you have it up and running, you can edit the GUI preferences to point to
where you really want to put timidity.cfg (assuming you don't want to leave
it polluting the windows directory) and remove it from c:\windows.

C) FLAGS THAT AFFECT HOW TIMIDITY RUNS

I don't use the GUI interface. The GUI interface should be fairly self
explanatory anyhow. If you are a Win32 user that likes to drag and drop
files on to player shortcuts, create a .bat file and make a shortcut to it.
You can also set this .bat file as your default midi player, set it as a
helper app in web browsers, etc.. Just associate the midi file type with
the .bat file and you're set. Dragging and dropping onto the shortcut to the
.bat file works fine. Be sure to check the "Close on Exit" box so that the
console window closes when the midi finishes playing. I recommend putting
the .bat file in your path so that you can run it from any directory you have
midi in. My .bat file looks like this (except that it's all on one line
instead of being chopped up):

c:\timidity\timpp291q -c c:\timidity\timidity.cfg -B 32 -f -m 3000 -EFchorus=2

-EFreverb=1,63 -Od1S -s 33075 -p 256 -U -t nocnv -int %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6
%7 %8 %9

Explanation of the flags I just used:

first off, I'm using my C-Spline build of the program ('q' for Quality)

-c c:\timidity\timidity.cfg Tells it where the timidity.cfg file is

-B 32 Gives it a decent buffer size
-f Toggle fast decay on, sounds more like
it should to me
-m 3000 Decay pedal sustains for 3000 msec
-EFchorus=2 This turns on an alternate chorus mode
which creates a surround sound effect
and does not detune the chorus notes
as much. Sometimes -EFchorus=1 sounds
better, but I usually prefer mode 2
-EFreverb=1,63 Decent global reverb level, rather
than only applying reverb to midi
which have per channel reverb controls
-Od1S Use Win32 audio device, 16 bit stereo
-s 33075 the sampling rate
-p 256 maximum polyphony
-D 10 Force channel 10 to drums (I don't
use this anymore because it messes up
>= 10 channel mod files)
-U Unload instruments from memory between
 songs (I like to conserve memory)
-t nocnv Display the Japanese characters in
the regular extended character set
rather than make them all '.'
-int Use the ncurses interface with tracing

You can also tack on 'r' and/or 'l' to the -i flag to toggle randomizing and
looping of playlists. If you use hardware reverb on your soundcard, you may
want disable software reverb/chorus effects so you don't drown the midi in
reverb. Also, using -EFreverb=1,xxx instead of just -EFreverb=1 saves a
great deal of CPU time on GS/XG midi, since it doesn't have to handle the
varying reverb for each channel independantly. If you are short on CPU
power, and have memory to spare, you can use the -S flag to increase the
amount of memory used to cache non-chorus'd notes. I hardly ever see
a midi that can't cache 100% of the notes when using -S9M, so you shouldn't
usually need to allocate more than 9 megs, and often you can get by with far
less than that. The default cache size is fine for most people, but if you
use C-Spline interpolation on a Pentium 133 with an ISA sound card (yes, I
know my machine is getting old and slow) with the chorus and reverb effects I
list above, every non-cached note can take a rather large chunk of valuable
CPU time.

Now that TiMidity has really good MOD file support, you may want to use it to
play your mod files. If so, you might also want to disable chorus/reverb,
since many mod files already simulate these things by how the author handled
the channels, panning, and volumes. For instance, enabling -EFchorus=2 for
2nd_skav.s3m (intro/credits to the Unreal II - 2nd Reality demo) will sound
very strange, and will even lead to bad constructive/destructive
interferrence of the voices, since the mod was written to simulate a surround
sound effect to begin with. I think it's kind of cool to hear the voices
cancel each other out, but it certainly doesn't sound very good :)

D) MORE USAGE ADVICE

If you only have an ISA soundcard, and have a free PCI slot, buy a new PCI
sound card. This will make timidity run about 3x faster (rough estimage, but
it is a large amount whatever it is), because the CPU is not having to insert
so many I/O wait states when it interacts with the sound card. I should do
this myself....

Win32 users may also want to use the -e flag, which tells TiMidity to be
"evil" and set itself a high task priority. If the sound gets choppy while
running other things, or the TiMidity window is not the active one, this could
help. It is somewhat humorous to note that the evil flag has no effect when
running MS Word. Evidently, Word just sucks up nearly all your system
resources. Is this yet another example of how "evil" Micro$oft is ? ^_^

If you click in the console window and the program pauses, just hit return to
resume normal functioning. The same goes for pauses when it load a midi, but
hasn't drawn the ncurses display yet. I am pretty sure this is a problem
with pdcurses, and I think I've hacked my pdcurses library so that it doesn't
happen anymore. But if it happens with your binary, just hit return and
keep going.
E) MORE WIN32 GUI ISSUES (maybe other GUI's too?):

The older GUI versions (all versions less than hacked version Z1) don't
support the drumsets and SFX (due to a .cfg file parsing error), won't use
any drumset not on channel 10, and may even crash if the xgmap2.cfg is
included. Older GUI versions were noticably slower than their console
counterparts, and were missing many features. The current GUI is actually
quite good now, with no loss of speed compared to the console version, and
most of the options the average user will want are available through the
menus. Double click on the TiMidity logo box a few times to cycle through
display modes. For the real "power users" out there, there are more settings
you can change by editing the timpp32g.ini. If you still can't find the
option you want to change in the .ini file, just specify it as a command line
argument just like you would for the console version. For example, if you
want to use chorus mode 2, you will have to specify "-EFchorus=2" as a flag
in the line that runs the GUI executable because the current GUI (2.9.1 as of
this writing) has not been updated to know that modes > 1 exist. If you
enter "2" on the chorus level line in the GUI preferences, it will use chorus
mode 1 with a global level of 2, which is not at all what you wanted it to
do. In order to be SURE that the GUI is configured like you want it, enter
in the same flags on the line that runs it as you would use if you were
running the console version. It can do everything the console version can,
it just can't configure it all properly through the menus (or save it
correctly to the .cfg file).

F) HOW TO OUTPUT TO A WAV FILE

If you are using the console version, add "-Ow1S -s 44100 -o output.wav"
where output.wav is whatever file name you want for the output wav file.
-Ow1S tells it to "O"utput a "w"av file in "1"6 bit "S"tereo. -s 44100
sets the sampling rate to 44100. You'll probably also want to add "-p 256"
to make sure you never max out your polyphony. See the FLAGS THAT AFFECT
HOW TIMIDITY RUNS section above for more flags that you may want to use.

Also, use the cspline compiled binary, it will sound better.

If you use the Win32 GUI, go to the Config/Preferences/Output menu. The

bottom portion of the menu has several output devices that you can choose.
It should currently be set to "Win32 Audio". Select "Riff Wave File"
instead. You can now enter the name of the wave file you want to write to
in the "Output File" box. When you hit play, it will begin writing the wav
file.

The Win32 GUI does *NOT* use cspline interpolation, only linear. If you
want higher sound quality, learn to use the cspline compiled console version.

G) IF YOU /STILL/ HAVE PROBLEMS WITH ANYTHING

Send me email with any questions you have. I tried to give a good overview
here to answer most of the questions I have received in the past, but if I
am too unclear, don't hesitate to ask me anything. And as always, I'd love
to hear any feedback on the quality of the patches, how to improve them
further, which ones are most in need of improvement, and any new patches you
may wish to send me.

Eric A. Welsh <ewelsh@gpc.wustl.edu>

Center for Molecular Design
Center for Computational Biology
Washington University
St. Louis, MO