Page created by
Antonio Larrosa
antlarr@wanadoo.es

Last updated on
26 Jan 2001

Page created on
17 Jan 2000

What is LibKMid ?

LibKMid is a library that implements all the features any application will ever need to play MIDI events on MIDI devices. Alternatively, it includes easy to use functions if all you want is play MIDI files in your application (for example, background music in a game).
LibKMid is based on the MIDI engine of KMid. KMid has been available since 1997, so it's engine is quite tested and works in a variety of systems (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc.)

Tell me more about LibKMid

LibKMid uses the OSS drivers to support External MIDI synthesizers, AWE, GUS and FM synths, along with soundcards from the SB Live family. You can add easily support for any other MIDI device you may find (but I'm afraid there isn't any left :-) ), MIDI Mappers (in the same format as MIDI mappers from KMid), and a MIDI file player engine that is able to play MIDI files even if they're really corrupted or broken.

Perhaps the main thing about LibKMid is that it's optimized to take up as little resources as possible, so playing a complex MIDI on my computer (a K6/200) takes approximately 0.1% of the CPU.

What about the API ?

The API is designed to be clear and easy to use. LibKMid's documentation is online at this link.

For most cases, you only want to use the KMidSimpleAPI class (or the equivalent plain C wrapper)

The documentation has been done using KDoc, the KDE documentation tool, made by Sirtaj Singh Khan.

Where can I download LibKMid current version from ?

You can download LibKMid from this page :

The RPM package has been made with SuSE-6.2, I suppose that it will also work for Caldera and RedHat systems, and perhaps even for Corel Linux.

libkmid-0.9.5-1.i386.rpm (157 Kb.) version 0.9.5

Or the package in tgz format :

libkmid-0.9.5.tar.bz2 (221 Kb.) version 0.9.5

If this site is very slow for you, go to the Download Section where there will be a list of other sites to download LibKMid from.

How do I install it ?

You're supposed to be a developer, so you should know ;-).

To start using it, have a look at the test directory.

What are LibKMid terms of use ?

Latest News

29 Jan 2000
- I've added ALSA support to LibKMid in just one day. The sources are only in the KDE cvs (in the kdelibs package). If you want to have a look at it, get one of the daily snapshots, or wait until I release libkmid 0.9.6

17 Jan 2000
- First release of LibKMid. The version is 0.9.5 because even if it's the first release, the library has been being used in KMid since 1997, so I think it's well tested :-)
- It's not 1.0 because I wanted to test first the configure scripts and whatever wasn't in KMid.