The KMid Handbook: Introduction

1. Introduction

KMid is KDE's midi and karaoke multimedia player. It features some features not found in any other unix midi player, such as realtime graphics and karaoke text highlighting among others. KMid runs on Linux and FreeBSD operating systems. It uses the OSS sound driver, so it should run on every system where KDE and OSS compile. KMid also supports the Linux Ultrasound Project Driver , which is required to get sound in GUS cards. I plan to support the ALSA driver as soon as it supports a sequencer device.

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 .

Hope you find KMid as fun to use as I found developing it.

Antonio Larrosa Jiménez
larrosa@kde.org

1.1 KMid's features

These are some of KMid's main features :

It has a very friendly user interface to display karaoke text with realtime highlighting of lyrics.
It features a graphical view of what is being played on each midi channel, by highlighting the keys pressed in (virtual) keyboards.
The most powerful Midi Mapper that you will ever find in any operating system.
Drag&drop so you can drop in KMid any midi file from a KFM window.
You can change the tempo of songs to play them slower or faster at your wish.
It shows lights to follow the rhythm of the song.
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.
Adjustable volume in realtime.
It can play broken midi files which make other players core dump !
It can open gzipped midi/karaoke files just as any other 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 you need the LUP driver and gusd installed).
Runs on Linux and FreeBSD (maybe also other unices ...).

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