EasyABC and Windows Media Player

Recently my EasyABC stopped playing back the music. It went through the whole playback procedure but there was no sound. After a lot of tedious digging I found that the problem was with Windows Media Player. WMP has simply stopped playing MIDI files. (As there are many complaints about this on the internet I presume it’s a reasonably wide spread irritant.) WMP is set as the default MIDI player and EasyABC uses the default.

A. I tried fixing the problem from within EasyABC by selecting: Settings/MIDI device settings…
This displayed a dialogue box offering a drop down for Output MIDI with the only choices being None or blank.

B. I tried from within Windows to reset the default MIDI player but it refused to accept anything other than WMP. (While it accepts VLC, my preferred media player, for all other media files, when it comes to MIDI, it doesn’t want to know)

C. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling WMP - no joy.

D. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling EasyABC - equally joyless.

Ideally, what I would like to do is point EasyABC to VLC.

Has anyone else experienced this? Or, have a solution to this?

It’s been awhile since I’ve used EasyABC. I’ll try to look on an old tablet & see if it’s still on there. Until then I’m fairly certain I was using Timidity with .mid files Not 100% sure but I think this is where I would have downloaded it. https://sourceforge.net/projects/twsynth/

If I manage to sort it out I’ll post again. One way or another I’ve usually gotten some version and configuration of EasyABC to function. But I’m an infrequent dabbler.

Just looked at the link I posted. It looks too dated, not a good sign. I will make an effort to find better info. Hopefully someone here has current information about playing sound files.

Looking at EasyABC-1.3.8.6, it seems to be playing midi using the FluidSynth library.
Is that the version you are using? If not, try upgrading.
If it still doesn’t work you can get it to play midi using vlc by setting midiplayer_path to the full path of vlc.exe.

You might also need to configure vlc with the path to a soundfonts file such as freepats in the [fluidsynth] section of vlcrc located at appdataroamingvlc.

Thanks, Mad Sweeney, you set me on the right path and I’ve now got it working.

I managed to get it using VLC by setting the midi player path to the vlc.exe and that played the MIDI files - but it brought up VLC in full screen and the sound controls in EasyABC were out of commission; stop, start, playback speed, etc. all had to be done in VLC. So that was only a partial solution.

It was the sound fonts suggestion that was key. I remembered that when I first installed VLC it required the installation of an sf2 file in order to play MIDI. Could it be that WMP had somehow lost its link to a sound font file? So in EasyABC I left the midi player setting blank (so now, EasyABC would again be looking for the default player - WMP) and set the sound font path to the sf2 file I’d installed for VLC. And that was it!

Thanks again. My EasyABC is back in working order.

Brilliant!