Been trying to find an answer to this problem all day. I searched all over this forum to see if there was anything that'd help, but now I come and post this topic.

The problem is, that I can get a midi playing.. but after a while of it playing, it stutters a bit and then chokes(the whole program) for a few seconds, and then it unchokes and then the midi speeds up to catch up to its place.

Any ideas what could be causeing this?

It only chokes when its playing the midi.
And it doesnt just choke once, it does it multiple times the longer you listen to the midi.

Can you post some code (playing parts, main loop, etc)? The whole program choking does not necessarily sound like a MIDI-specific problem, there could be something wrong in for ex the frame limiter, if you have one.

And welcome, awesome pixel art you have there (and on your site).

thanks, here's some code to help find the problem, hopefully..

and here is the frame limit function since you mentioned it..

volatile long speed_counter = 0; // A long integer which will store the value of the
                                             // speed counter. 
void increment_speed_counter() // A function to increment the speed counter
{
  speed_counter++; // This will just increment the speed counter by one. :)
}
END_OF_FUNCTION(increment_speed_counter); // Make sure you tell it that it's the end of the
                                                                 // function

Are you trying to loop the midi? Why not use:

play_looped_midi()

Also, have you tried loading a different midi song to see if it "chokes" as well?

looping is not a problem, it chokes even when it runs the midi once.
I've also tried multiple different midi files, and it's the same with each.

There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with that code (pertaining to this particular problem - you should check whether the bitmap/midi loads were successful though + some other unrelated things ).

Try examples/exmidi and tests/miditest, do they exhibit the same problem? What compiler/OS/midi synth are you using?

Is speed_counter initialized properly?

I dont know how to get exmidi.exe to play a midi file, but I downloaded someones allegro game which played midis, and it played fine in their game.

when i run miditest.exe it says microsoft midi mapper under the driver..
my os is winxp, and i use msvc++ 6.0

exmidi.exe <filename>

oh ok,

yeah, driver is microsoft midi mapper, and the music plays fine in exmidi.exe

I notice when I change the bps to like 6000 or some big number, it takes forever for the program to quit while it just keeps playing the music with a black screen(when the program shuts down). dunno if that has any significance..

Why not just play_midi before the loop, instead of inside of it?

i tried that too, it makes no difference.

I tried takeing out the timer function stuff, and it had no difference either.

In Windows9x I've noticed that any huge disk access will cause any midi player stuff to "choke", seems that the multitasker is locked out or something.

Hmmm...reading that again makes me think that something is making the sound driver "think" or the processor or something. At this point, I would just make a small program and just focus directly on the playing the midi without any stuttering. Something like:

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
     allegro_init();
     install_keyboard();
     install_sound(DIGI_AUTODETECT, MIDI_AUTODETECT, argv[0]);

     midi_intro = load_midi("intro_temp.mid");
     play_looped_midi(midi_intro, 0, -1); 
     while(!key[ESCAPE]){}

     return 0;
}
END_OF_MAIN();

hm.. odd.

I did a small program:

and it still has the choking problem..
do you think maybe it's my compiler?

No. Like you said, without the midi, it runs fine. I doubt that has anything to do with it.

Is it choking in the same parts or is it relatively sporadic?

Just for the heck of it, try:

while(!key[KEY_ESC]){ rest(1); }

its relatively sporadic..
plays for a while, then begins choking, then plays for a while, begins choking again and so forth..

EDIT!:
Inphernic, that fixed it! It doesnt seem to choke up anymore.
Why is that? o_o
Thanks!!

EDIT2:
hm, actually, it doesnt fix it, but it makes it take longer before i encounter the choking..
this sux that i cant post consecutive replies..

The OS' scheduler may throttle your application in order to give some CPU time for other processes. If another process (perhaps even with a higher priority) wants to do something intensive, your program could be affected by that. If the choking seems to be periodic, that might help you to identify the offending process (if any).

Rest(1) effectively introduces a delay of 1ms (due to granularity, more like 10ms) to your program, by which it makes sure that it's not hogging all the CPU time. Considering that adding it had a positive effect, I'd say the problem is indeed related to some sort of throttling. I'm not an expert on scheduling though, so take this with a grain of salt.

You can use the "Send to top" button after a period of inactivity to send this thread right back to the top without making a reply (useful if you just edit your last message). Don't abuse it, though.

You will notice that if you play a MIDI in Windows Media Player or WinAmp (just to name a couple), you will not get these problems. That is because those programs fully delegate the MIDI functionality to Windows, which in turn uses its own real-time services to ensure stuttering doesn't occur (except under extreme load). Allegro programs on the other hand take full control of the MIDI sequence and send MIDI events to the OS's MIDI mapper (or its own if that's what you choose) and are therefore at the mercy of the operating system's multitasking. There are other related problems of course, such as the Allegro MIDI routines stripping out XG and GS events, and even some GM events. MIDI is bad enough without it being clobbered by Allegro.

The only solution is don't use Allegro MIDI. Ever.

And by relying on plain MIDI altogether, your songs can end up sounding totally different on different setups. What goes for alternatives: go for XM/IT if file size is a priority, MP3/OGG if quality is a priority (this is a bit of a simplified statement, but anyway).

MIDI is also very bad when it comes to Linux compatibility. In the most cases the only way to play them is using Timidity, which gives very crappy sound at the cost of very much CPU time.

My personal advice: Go for IT! Use Schism Tracker for creating the music (Win32 builds here) and DUMB for playing it in your Allegro program.

@ Schism Tracker

hm, i see..

Well, before all of this, i did try to use dumb, but I was unable to make it work, because the instructions to get it incorporated into a project were confuseing for me.

If someone could help me with that, maybe I can try it again..

Woah! Looks just like Scream Tracker 3. That was a sweet piece of software back in the day.

Start a new thread on it and see what happens.

Uhm, no. It looks exactly 100% like Impulse Tracker. Which looks a bit like Scream Tracker.