Re: [fluid-dev] FluidSynth 1.1.2 release planning

[Graham Goode]

Hi David,

There are a lot of people using fluidsynth with jOrgan and running on
laptops and older computers with below 1 Gig ram. Playin - a 60 rank
virtual pipe organ very quickly eats up the available polyphony - just
using 5 ranks of the Pedal, 8 ranks on the 1st manual coupled to the
Pedal), and 4 ranks on the 2nd Manual (also coupled to the Pedal and
the 1st manual) you play 17 notes each time you use the Pedal, and 12
notes with every finger. On a fast musical piece using 10 fingers and
two feet you can quickly get to 512 notes because of overlaping
releases, add octave and sub octave couplers and you get to 1024 notes
quickly, then play the whole organ of 60 ranks, with octave and sub
octave and yikes... your polyphony is gone unless the voice-stealing
algorythm is actively cutting out the old releases. So ideally one
would like to allocate over 4000 voice polyphony so that voice
stealing wouldn't be neccessary, but then RAM and CPU become the
issue. Of course, if Stereo samples are being used, with addes release
waves, then the situation doubles or triples in complexity and need.

Hope that adds some perspective to the voice-stealing enhancement request :)

GrahamG