[SOLVED] Mint19 WINE and MIDI

[xGuy]

I thought I'd post here as I have spent a lot of time on this and it just might help someone else.

I have an elderly Windows Music Notation program called "Finale Guitar". It accepts MIDI input from a music keyboard and plays the sound out via MIDI out. It has an invaluable feature (playing chords from chord symbols) which MuseScore doesn't support so I want to keep it. It won't run fully in a VM (VMware Player or Virtual Box) because these don't support MIDI.

On Mint 17.3 I have this program working perfectly. It sits in its own Wine Prefix (set up by Play On Linux). One can enter notes via the MIDI USB keyboard and play the results back. I am using Fluid Synth and also I have pulseaudio and jack2 installed - not recommended by some but I like pulse audio and Qsynth requires jack.

On Mint 19.3 I just couldn't get it to work. First I just copied the Wine prefix over into PoL but let it use the default WINE3.0. But on starting I received a warning :- The current MIDI setup is damaged. Copy the original MIDIMAP.CFG file to the Windows system directory and try again.

Well I couldn't do that because there was no such file. I tried setting up a new PoL prefix and installing the program from scratch. Same issue. Then I tried using the same WINE version as on Mint 17.3 (1.6.2) - but the program died on activation. Tried several more WINE versions but only 3.x versions would load the program and they all had the same error.

Next I studied a recent post (July 2018) entitled Ted's Linux MIDI Guide :-

http://tedfelix.com/linux/linux-midi.html

I didn't exactly follow everything in it but I felt happy that my set up was OK. Using aplaymidi and aconnect I was able to show that my USB MIDI keyboard was working and would play the notes I pressed out through my speakers.

Next I turned to the WINE HQ MIDI guide at :-

https://wiki.winehq.org/MIDI

I downloaded the wintest.exe mcishell program and copied it into the PoL wineprefix C:/Windows/system32

Then used Pol's "Open a Shell" command to run wine winetest.exe mcishell as per the instructions to play a MIDI file.

It didn't work but one of the error messages was interesting - it referred to being unable to open shared library libsound-module-conf-pulse.so and went on to say No software synthesizer midiport found. Midi sound output probably won't work

Now on Mint17.3 I had installed (via Software Manager) a product libasound2-plugins. But this didn't appear in the Mint 19 Software Manager.

In the end, having done some more research and also taken a complete system backup, I ran :-

sudo apt-get install libasound2-plugins:i386

and rebooted Mint19. After which Finale Guitar gave no error message on start up and its MIDI configurator offered the Keyboard as a MIDI input device and Qsynth as an output device. And it worked perfectly as on Mint 17.3.

I haven't found any audio regressions with this but obviously I can't foresee if there might be adverse side effects in other situations. It worked for me and means I can press on with MInt 19 testing.

[MrEen]

Nicely done, xGuy! And thanks for the links to Ted's. I've read it before, but it appears I forgot to bookmark it. Not this time!

[xGuy]

Thanks MrEen!