Re: [fluid-dev] problems with fluidsynth 1.1.6 on a raspberry pi

[Jan Newmarch]

Thanks to Christian and Aere. Here are some more results on a file nightsin.kar of various choices using pidstat:

Version	flags	sound font	cpu %	memory %	comments
1.1.5	none	FluidR3_GM	75%	43%	unlistenable
1.1.5	-z 4096	FluidR3_GM	70%	43%	unlistenable
1.1.5	-z 4096	GeneralUser	76%	20%	unlistenable
1.1.6	none	FluidR3_GM	80%	40%	still distorting
1.1.6	-z 4096	FluidR3_GM	75%	40%	distorts when usage > 90%
1.1.6	-z 4096	GeneralUser	65%	none shown	distorts when usage > 90%

I haven't tried Aere's suggestions yet. Overall, 1.1.6 sounded better than 1.1.5, but that may be the result of the options compiled in.

Using pidstat with a resolution of 1 second I got the following histogram (using octave) of the CPU usage for the last case, 1.1.6 with GeneralUser soundfont. I know CPU usage of 300% is probably a bit exaggerated but the file didn't sound too good at that point! Are there standard MIDI test files for isolating what factors cause what effects?



Cheers

Jan
--

On Sat, 2012-11-17 at 08:09 -0600, S. Christian Collins wrote:

Try GeneralUser GS FluidSynth version from this site. It is much smaller than FluidR3, so it should hopefully use less CPU.
-~Chris

On 11/17/2012 04:25 AM, Jan Newmarch wrote:

Recently there was a thread about 1.1.5 on an RPi. I'm picking that up
for 1.1.6. I have a Model B RPi with 512M RAM. I have the Raspbian hard
float image installed rather than the Debian soft float (which behaves
worse). I have applied the security fixes suggested by Aere Greenway.
I'm running it with period set by -z 4096 as suggested by David
Henningsson. I'm observing CPU usage by running top in a separate
window:

fluidsynth -a alsa -l -z 4096 /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2 \    
           youvemad.kar

Some simple MIDI files play okay. Others hit CPU usage between 40-99%,
varying throughout the song. At 99% CPU the sound is very broken up, too
bad to be really playable.

It has been suggested that smaller sound fonts will help. What smaller
sound fonts are there?

I can do more experiments if desired.

Jan

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Dr Jan Newmarch
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