MIDI Keyboard on Sound Blaster HOWTO 1.0 1. Copyright 2. Introduction 3. Requirements 4. Adding supports of your kernel 5. Installing software 1. Copyright This document is written by Hideki Saito. Reposting is allowed, but please do not modify this. Please ask before publishing this document. You can contact me via E-mail at hideki@eskimo.com 2. Introduction Some people may wonder how to use a MIDI keyboard with Sound Blaster. Actually, this is not as easy as just connecting the MIDI keyboard to a 15-pin MIDI in-out port (the Sound Blaster MIDI in-out port often works as a joystick port.) 3. Requirements Of course you need a MIDI keyboard. Please take a little time to check to see if you have a MIDI in-out port on the back of your sound card. If you see a port that has 15 little holes, you have a MIDI in-out port. Some of the Sound Blaster clones may not have a MIDI in-out port. In This case, you may want to consider buying a new sound card, or MIDI interface card. You can adopt things in this document if the MIDI interface card that you are planning to buy, other-wise this document will not help, since it is out of your range. You will need am SB-to-MIDI cable (this will cost about $15-$40, depending on length, and quality of the cable). Remember to connect one end of the MIDI out cable into the MIDI-in port on your MIDI keyboard, and other end of the MIDI-in cable into the MIDI out port on your MIDI keyboard. Connect other side of keyboard into the 15-pin MIDI in-out board on your sound card. After that, you need to check if your joystick/MIDI is enabled, other-wise this will not work. There are two types of sound cards. If your sound card uses hardware configuration, you need to open your computer and change the switchs (this maybe jumpers) to enable. If you have a sound card that is software configurable, you can run a program to change it. You might need to boot DOS if your configure program is on DOS. 4. Adding supports of your kernel Of course your kernel must support sounds. Have your sound card manual and check each configuration. Then run a kernel configuring program. You need Sound Blaster support (this varies, but most Sound Blaster clones will work fine with this setting). According to my settings, you need to add MPU-401 support, and MIDI interface support in addition. Make sure addresses are correct, otherwise there will be conflicts. Read your manual and check each base address,IRQ (on many sound cards, the default is 330, IRQ 7). Make sure that you set so both two MPU-401 I/O correctly (those numbers must be same). Menu configuration of the kernel would help this. After you configured them, you need to rebuild the kernel and image. 5. Installing software After this, you can install your favorite MIDI sequencing programs. I will not discuss them in here. If you have no ideas, use the program JAZZ!, which is an excellent MIDI sequencing program. You can find it at SunSite and a lot of other sites. Also installing PlayMidi is recommended. After all, everything should work fine.