Re: [fluid-dev] Re: An evil screeching noise when playing

[Josh Green]

On Sat, 2005-10-15 at 11:51 +0300, Kimmo Sundqvist wrote:
> I don't know how familiar you are with Gentoo linux's build system, Portage.  
> It resembles the ports system of FreeBSD a bit.
> 

Yes, I'm a Gentoo person myself.

> So, I can type "emerge fluidsynth" and it will build Fluidsynth and all that 
> it requires.  Fluidsynth 1.0.6 knows four USE variables that I can set either 
> globally or in a per-package fashion.  Those are ALSA, Jack, SSE and Ladcca.  
> 
> Ladspa is, AFAIK. always enabled, and that is the decision of the Fluidsynth 
> packager for Gentoo.
> 
> I had it build 1.0.6 with Jack, SSE and Ladcca disabled, and the screeches 
> were there no more.  Using Unison.sf2 I can listen to music quite fine.  
> Except that the CPU usage goes to 99% immediately after starting Fluisynth, 
> even with no soundfont loaded.  Yet I experience no skipping in the sound, 
> unless I try to read a defective CD at the same time.
> 
> Using the 22MB Merlin soundfont, the relative volumes of instruments are 
> messed up, or some channels do not come through.  I don't know what causes 
> the problem, but the soundfont works ok with Timidity.
> 
> As soon as I have time, I will narrow the problem down to one USE variable.  
> I 
> remember doing this before, but couldn't remove the screech no matter what I 
> disabled.  I don't know what has changed since then.
> 
> -Kimmo S.
> 

SSE really shouldn't be used by default.  As far as I know it does not
provide that much better performance, and could be causing problems.  It
was implemented as a test and never really was polished to the point of
being very useful.  The original author who contributed this (Markus
Nentwig) even mentioned that it should probably be removed in its
current state.  The LADSPA support could be causing the 100% CPU issue.
Do you think you could build FluidSynth stand alone, you wouldn't need
to install it.  Just run FluidSynth from the src directory, like
"src/fluidsynth".  This would likely provide some more insights into
whether its a configuration option that is causing the problems or not.
        Best regards,
        Josh Green

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