Following the procedure described in the article Installing RecAll-PRO and RecAll on Ubuntu Linux, we need to add some additional steps to enable WinChime to function under Linux. The standard Ubuntu distribution does not seem to include a MIDI synthesizer daemon, necessary for rendering WinChime’s sounds. We follow the procedure described here to install Timidity++ and configure it. For WinChime, the freepats samples sounds fine, so we did not bother with eawpatches. If we do everything right, WinChime should play correctly.
We first install Timidity using Synaptic Package Manager. Select “timidity“, and “timidity daemon” if available.
Start a terminal window and enter:
timidity -iA -B2,8 -Os1l -s 44100
and start WinChime. When you click the Play button you should hear chimes.
Now we need to configure timidity to start at boot. Googling older versions of timidity gives hints of a script installed in the /etc/init.d directory to do this, but I do not see one on the current timidity package.
(Aside: on a version of Ubuntu previous to 11.10, after using the installation instructions linked to above, the timidity daemon started at boot. However, in research for this article we uninstalled and installed timidity and found the timidity daemon no longer started at boot. If the daemon auto-starts for you, then ignore the rest of this application note.)
Perhaps not the standard “Linux way” of starting a timidity daemon, but I found this works for me: Launch “Startup Applications” and click the “Add” button. Enter as shown:
Now when I boot Ubuntu, the timidity daemon runs and WinChime works!
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