HOWTO: play MIDI files with VLC in Debian

It's very easy! And should also work for Ubuntu (and other Debian derivatives).

0. First of all, make sure you have already installed the VLC media player:

   # apt-get install vlc

1. Install the FluidSynth plugin:

   # apt-get install vlc-plugin-fluidsynth

2. Enjoy!
   You can open your file either with the VLC GUI, or from the CLI, e. g.:
   

   $ vlc ~/Music/MyFavoriteSong.midi

Adobe Flash Player: useful URLs

Adobe Flash Player: misc. useful links.

1. A table of current player versions for various platforms.
2. Download the current version of Adobe Flash Player.
3. Archived Flash Player versions.
4. Problems playing protected video content (Linux, Flash Player 11).
5. Flash Player Settings Manager.

MultiMedia Players in Windows and Linux

For MS Windows, my favourite audio player is foobar2000 [official site / Wikipedia]
(I'm tired of Winamp [official site / Wikipedia], and especially of the Windows Media Player [Wikipedia]; some people may like something else, e. g. AIMP [official site / Wikipedia]).

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For playing video, I use VLC media player [official site / Wikipedia], MPC-HC ("Media Player Classic - Home Cinema") [official site / Wikipedia] and (very rarely) MPlayer (incl. forks).

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In GNU/Linux, there are 2 powerful media players I frequently use (mostly for playing video): VLC and mpv [official site / Wikipedia].
mpv is a popular fork of MPlayer [official site / Wikipedia] & mplayer2 (itself a fork of MPlayer; now abandoned); they say it has more features and more rapid development process than the original one.
Sometimes I used mplayer[2] with a (now abandoned) GUI called gnome-mplayer.
BTW, I neither like nor use GNOME Videos (formerly called Totem) [official site / Wikipedia].
And some users also like xine [official site / Wikipedia] and Kodi (formerly XBMC) [official site / Wikipedia].

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There are some pretty console audio players: mpg123 (probably the best MP3 player around) [official site / Wikipedia], cmus ("C* Music Player") [official site / Wikipedia], moc ("music on console") [official site / Wikipedia], mp3blaster (now obsolete) etc., but I prefer mpv there :)

And now about GUI audio players. Some years ago I used XMMS ("X MultiMedia System") [official site / Wikipedia] (now discontinued) and Amarok [official site / Wikipedia] (it was too overweight for me). In the near past, I used Rhythmbox [official site / Wikipedia]; when Banshee [official site / Wikipedia] became the default player in Ubuntu, I was very disappointed (it was much more buggier than Rhythmbox and used that C# / Mono / .NET / etc. stuff); then I tried to use LXMusic (it uses XMMS2 [official site / Wikipedia] backend and has a minimalist GUI) for some time, used Exaile [official site / Wikipedia] a few times...
...and finally switched to Audacious [official site / Wikipedia]
(Audacious is a fork of (now defunct) Beep Media Player [official site / Wikipedia], which itself was a fork of XMMS; BTW, it supports Winamp skins; not to be confused with Audacity [official site / Wikipedia], a popular audio editor).

Some other popular players:

• Clementine (Wikipedia)
• DeaDBeeF
• Qmmp (Wikipedia)
• Quod Libet (Wikipedia)
• etc.

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Last updated: 2016-12-11