Re: [fluid-dev] DSP testing

[Peter Hanappe]

Tim Goetze wrote:
> [Peter Hanappe]
>
> > I overlooked  the case where the audio thread can be interupted, which
> > can happen if fluidsynth runs without priviledges. You are quite
> > right that that case poses a problem. A complication I see with the
> > fifos, though, is that when the user thread has to kill a voice, it send
> > the 'kill' request to the audio thread and then has to wait for the
> > audio thread to confirm the request. So you have to introduce
> > synchronization even if you use lock-free FIFOs.
>
>
> with the FIFO scheme proper, the note <-> voice mapping is done
> entirely by the audio thread. imagine the audio thread reading a
> complete MIDI stream and acting on all noteon/off, controller etc
> events, calling the equivalent of fluid_synth_noteon() itself.
>
> if the public interface (the user thread) wants to start a note, the
> respective function simply writes to the FIFO and lets the audio
> thread do the rest of the work.

The problem is that the audio thread cannot handle it all. The
noteon function calls upon the soundfont object to initialize the
voice. The soundfont object may do all kinds of non real-time stuff,
in particular loading files. So that has to be done by the user thread.
A solution would be to make the FIFO a stream of initialised voice
objects instead of noteon events. And then there could be a second
stream for events that modify the state of the voices (basically noteoff
and update_param). I'll take a look at the code how much change that
would involve.



> done right once, we'll never have to care about locking/sync issues
> anymore.

If you don't mind we can continue this discussion (if it's not too
boring). It should be done right.


Cheers,
P

> cheers,
>
> tim