Happy new year; music works now.

[Albert Vest <alvest@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I hope you're all enjoying this year so far.

I'm enjoying my Crimson Fields sessions slightly more since yesterday,
when updating some FreeBSD ports -- I decided to take a lazy way out of
rebuilding one port, and it caused the background music to start
working, which it never did before.

The ports: sdl_sound and sdl_mixer

sdl_mixer uses timidity++ for its midi interface.  It depends on
sdl_sound, so naturally I thought the latter had to be built with its
own "Software MIDI music" switch turned ON rather than OFF.

Unfortunately sdl_sound relies on "timidity", the old/abandoned program,
rather than "timidity++".  Last time I built sdl_sound, I remember
hacking the Makefile to convince it that it had what it needed from
timidity++ (it never did of course).

This time, I was too tired/lazy to try to fool make.  Had a bad cold
last week, couldn't find my old notes.  So I just turned "Software MIDI
music" to OFF and rebuilt sdl_sound without it.  Somehow sdl_mixer still
could be built with timidity++ option turned ON, and didn't complain.

Afterwards, when I ran crimson (which I have NOT rebuilt lately), I
heard the background midi.  I knew it was the game music because it got
quieter or louder when I dragged the music volume slider.

So for future reference, MIDI music can be made to work in FreeBSD at
least by turning MIDI off in a downstream port.  Anyone else find that
counter-intuitive?  Similar build tricks might make it work in other
unix-like environments.

Thanks for reading,
Albert.

-- 
  http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_A.html
  Albert Vest, Al Vest at Brakiri dot com