This repository contains a Nix package for TiMidity++.

TiMidity++ is a software synthesizer. It can play MIDI files by converting them into PCM waveform data; give it a MIDI data along with digital instrument data files, then it synthesizes them in real-time, and plays. It can not only play sounds, but also can save the generated waveforms into hard disks as various audio file formats.

TiMidity++ is a free software, distributed under the terms of GNU general public license.

There is already a Nix package for TiMidity++ in nixpkgs, but it does not support some features, and in particular the generation of OGG files, which is of interest to me personally.

The Nix Flake provides multiple targets to build timidity:

• timidityFromNixpkgs provides TiMidity++ as-is from nixpkgs. This is also the default target.

• timidityFromNixpkgs' does just the same, except the call to callPackage is inlined in the flake.

• timidityWithVorbis also goes through callPackage but with an additional enableVorbis = true argument. It provide a variant of TiMidity++ compiled with support for OGG Vorbis.

Building is trivial with Nix. The timidity binary ends up in the directory result/bin.

$ nix build .#<target>
$ result/bin/timidity --version
TiMidity++ version 2.15.0
[...]

Alternatively, one can run timidity directly with:

$ nix run .#<target> -- --version
TiMidity++ version 2.15.0
[...]

A last option is to run the flake immediately from the GitHub repository, with:

$ nix run github:niols/nixpkg-timidity#<target> -- --version
TiMidity++ version 2.15.0
[...]

Once built, you can try to compile a test MIDI file to WAV and see if things work correctly.

$ nix run .#timidityFromNixpkgs -- -Ow test/the-ashgrove.midi
Playing test/the-ashgrove.midi
MIDI file: test/the-ashgrove.midi
Format: 1  Tracks: 3  Divisions: 384
Sequence:
Text: creator:
Text: GNU LilyPond 2.22.2
Track name: \new:
Output test/the-ashgrove.wav
Playing time: ~37 seconds
Notes cut: 0
Notes lost totally: 0

You can then try again, but to compile to OGG this time. At this point, it should fail.

$ nix run .#timidityFromNixpkgs -- -Ov test/the-ashgrove.midi
Playmode `v' is not compiled in.
Try timidity -h for help

But if you try with the version supposed to support OGG Vorbis:

$ nix run .#timidityWithVorbis -- -Ov test/the-ashgrove.midi
Playing test/the-ashgrove.midi
MIDI file: test/the-ashgrove.midi
Format: 1  Tracks: 3  Divisions: 384
Sequence:
Text: creator:
Text: GNU LilyPond 2.22.2
Track name: \new:
Output test/the-ashgrove.ogg
Playing time: ~37 seconds
Notes cut: 0
Notes lost totally: 0

Fun fact: The difference also shows up in the help where an additional line specifies that Ogg Vorbis is an available output mode. For instance:

$ diff <(nix run .#timidityFromNixpkgs -- --help) <(nix run .#timidityWithVorbis -- --help)
243a244
>   -Ov          Ogg Vorbis