[fluid-dev] Re: fluidsynth on mac OS X

[Josh Green]

On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 04:03, Ebrahim Mayat wrote:
> With Jack started, I can play back MidiFiles together with a loaded  
> soundfont file. Even though I have 320 MB of RAM, running all this does  
> cause my iMac to stutter. Time to max out the RAM on my machine I  
> guess.
> 

Hmm, that might not be a RAM problem. How big is the SoundFont you are
loading? When you say that it causes your iMac to stutter, I assume you
are referring to the audio output? Does it seem to be affected by system
load? Try doing other CPU intensive tasks at the same time to test for
this. It could be that Jack doesn't have the needed scheduling priority
to assure low latency audio output. I would try increasing the Jack
audio buffer size or number of buffers (which will increase latency). I
don't know that many details about how Jack runs on OS X.

> The other reason I compiled fluidsynth was to be able to play back  
> Soundfont files using MIDI keyboard triggering. How does one do this?
> 

I imagine that MidiShare needs to route your MIDI keyboard to
FluidSynth. I'm not sure how this is done though since I have never used
MidiShare. Perhaps there is some documentation somewhere that could help
you.

> Anyway, I'd like to compile SWAMI also. So this would be my immediate  
> next project.
> 

Provided you have Fink and GTK 1.2 this shouldn't be too hard.

> Josh, thanks again for the help and encouragement. If you would like  
> the binary and the dynamic libs, I'd be happy to put them on my .Mac  
> site for downloading.
> 

Ideally it would be nice to set things up so FluidSynth can be easily
packaged for Fink. It seems like Jack is probably the best solution
right now for audio output, but that would mean that Jack should also be
part of Fink. As I mentioned before, I do have access to an OS X machine
on the SourceForge compile farm. I'll look into Fink packages and the
like, although I'm sure I could use some assistance in this area.

> All the best.
> Ebrahim

Regards,
        Josh green