KMid 1.2 . Antonio Larrosa Jimenez (antlarr@arrakis.es) . 14-9-98 . 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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