[haiku-development] Re: MidiKit1
- From: pete.goodeve@xxxxxxxxxxxx
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:36:59 -0700
Interesting -- this thread on Haiku midi enlightened me considerably!
Thanks to Humdinger for the link to the tickets. Who'd'a'thunk that to
get MidiPlayer to work, you should rename any soundfont as 'big_synth.sy'!
There's obviously a lot here that needs work, and I'm willing to lend
a hand where I can.
[For a start, if the synth is going to need a fixed soundset that is *not*
in Headspace/Beatnik format, it shouldn't be called 'big_synth.sy'! (The
BeOS confusion -- 'big_synth.sy' vs 'Patches111.hsb' etc -- is something
that doesn't need to be perpetuated...) Maybe at the minimum 'synth.sf2'
if it is a soundfont. Probably should just be a Preferences selection,
anyway.]
On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 10:01:02AM -0200, André Braga wrote:
>
> a.1) Pick any two for a sound font: free and freely redistributable,
> high quality, small size. A nice sound font would eat 8mb at the bare
> minimum, and they don't compress well.
Their size seems to vary wildly. The (free) Unison.sf2 I usually use is 28MB,
but (what I think is) the AWE64 font from ROM is only 4MB (not distributable
officially of course). Some speciality sets are a lot smaller -- I have
a nice "Cinema Organ" set that is only 1.9 MB and a 'vintage synth' one
that's only 300K! I have another that I understood was distributed with
RedHat and is only 100K, but it doesn't play either, so I'd guess the 'ROM'
in it's name has something to do with that... (:-/)
I suppose what should be done is to make some optional soundfonts easily
available for download, and direct people to those from the docs.
> b) Considering that the scheduler still has issues with latency, using
> Haiku for MIDI work is not going to pan out well. [....]
Is this why driving the MidiPlayer from live input is so pokey? I have
no problems at all with pure MIDI I/O in Haiku (MusicWeaver runs well).
And SqueekySynth in BeOS (which also uses fluidsynth) is very useable live.
I think fluidsynth has some settings for buffer size and so on, but I
don't know how you'd enter them in Haiku. (I remember having to do a
lot of command-line tweaking to get it to be responsive under Linux.)
Cheers,
-- Pete --
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