KMid 1.0 . Antonio Larrosa Jimenez (antlarr@arrakis.es) . 22-6-98 . Malaga (Spain)
1. About KMid
KMid is a midi/karaoke player for Linux and BSD o.s. that is fully integrated
in the KDE environment .
It uses the OSS sound driver, so KMid may run in other operating systems
in which OSS and KDE compile. KMid also supports the Linux Ultrasound
Project Driver (LUP from now on), which is required to get sound
with a GUS card .
KMid shows the lyrics in the screen changing its color at the same
time the music is playing, so it is very easy to follow the tune of the songs .
I've include some examples, which are installed in the $KDEDIR/share/apps/kmid
directory .
1.1. KMid's features
KMid has a nice interface to display karaoke text .
The most powerful Midi Mapper that you will ever find .
Drag & drop so you can drop in KMid any midi file from a kfm window .
Customizable fonts for karaoke text to be displayed .
Supports the two standards to introduce lyrics in midi files, that is, lyrics or text events (and guess which one a song uses automatically) .
Session Management. If a song is playing while you logout from KDE, the next
time you login, the same song will start playing .
Can play some broken midi files which make other players core dump !
Can open gzipped files just as any other midi file .
Consumes approximately 0.1% of my CPU (depends on the complexity of
the song) .
Supports external midi synths, AWE , FM and GUS cards (for the latter needs the Linux Ultrasound Project driver and gusd installed) .
Runs on Linux and FreeBSD (perhaps also other unices ...) .
1.2. KMid's requirements
KMid requires to work:
KDE
Well, you probably already have this :-)
A sound card
The sound quality depends greatly in your soundcard, it's not
the same to play the music using an FM device, than using an AWE card .
Altough using an external synth is far better than both :-)
1.3. Some notes
If you have an AWE card and you get a binary distribution of KMid (i.e. in
a rpm package), you will probably not be able to use your soundcard .
This is due to the needings of the AWE driver at compile time to build a
binary with AWE support .
So to get your AWE card working, you will have to get the source code
(found at KMid's homepage and every KDE mirror) and compile it yourself .
KMid's homepage is at http://www.arrakis.es/~rlarrosa/kmid.html
You can download the latest version from there or take a developer version
from the latest kdemultimedia snapshot which is found in ftp.kde.org and its
mirrors .
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