[PD] Re: fluild~ shared soundfonts update

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
Larry Troxler hat gesagt: // Larry Troxler wrote:

> Frank, I haven't heard from Norbert Schnell yet about his ideas about Max/PD 
> compatibility; Is Norbert.Schnell at ircam.fr his current e-mail address?

That's the one I only have as well, and I think it's correct. 

> The whole issue of how this should work is still murky in my mind. I realized 
> another problem with the [ fluid~ drums.sf2 DRUMS] creation syntax; not only 
> is there a problem with creating a fluid in the DRUMS group loading a 
> different font, but to be consistent with a creation soundfont being 
> equivalent to a load, then if you were to duplicate this object, then each 
> you would end up with n instances of a a shared soundfont loaded n times into 
> each fluid~ (since there is no check against loading a sounfont twice).
> 
> I'm almost tempted to consider a completely different approach: let's forget 
> about the "group" idea and to just have the fluid~ load message (or 
> creation-time soundfont) share a soundfont if the filename strings are equal. 
> Of course, on most OS's, the same file can be reached by more than one 
> pathname string, but I don't think it's a problem to require them to be 
> referred to the same way if you want to share the soundfont.
> 
> This would require that a "reload" message be implemented, in case the 
> soundfont file has indeed changed and you _do_ want to load it again. I seem 
> to remember either a fluidsynth API for this, and/or that Norbert Schnell has 
> already implemented reload in his Max version.

Checking, what new features are in fluidsynth~ and how Norbert
realized them is still on my Todo-list, which is a bit crammed
currently, as usual...

The filename approach sounds like a simple and easy solution. I'm
curious which you decided on in the end. 

> Man oh man, this is sure taking more thought than I anticipated. This is one 
> of those cases where a feature is trivial to implement for my own use, but 
> more involved than it should be to get working in a way that makes sense for 
> everyone. It's especially a shame because I doubt the shared soundfont 
> feature would be important to  most of the people who use fluid~. Plus, it's 
> kind of a kludge anyway; really it would be best if we could get the 
> fluidsynth API to give seperate audio outputs for each voice (and then also 
> specify which output a given note event goes to).

I think, I remember that there indeed was talk about something like
this on the fluid-dev list. In the end, having this inside fluidsynth
would be the best solution.

Regarding bundling a soundfont with fluid~: There is a coll soundfont
called "MiniPiano" available on hammersound.com, which is really tiny.
It can be freely distributed for "non-commercial use" only, though. 

A nice GPL Rhodes piano soundfont is available here:
http://www.yeeking.net/index.php?location=Sound%20Fonts
At 3.7M it's not that small and sometimes has problems with fluid~.

ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                               _ ______footils.org__