Re: [fluid-dev] Allow soundfonts to be searched from multiple directories

[sqweek E.]

I had similar thoughts, re. searching the file system path not being a synth 
feature. But simply deferring to the application has other downsides when it 
comes to soundfont adoption in general - end users must manually configure each 
application and there’s no standard way to do this. Eg. for my application I 
chose to dodge this configuration and bundle a soundfont, which removes burden 
from less technical users but also means users who already have sound fonts 
installed need to download 100mb instead of 10mb.

Fluidsynth is probably in a good position to be able to define conventions like 
standard search paths and/or configuration files - it would be great if the 
result could be adopted by other soundfont based software?

-sqweek

> On 2 Nov 2018, at 03:18, Carlo Bramini <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> if I can say my opinion, it would be better to leave that change outside the 
> library.
> It looks more a feature for the application that it is using FluidSynth.
> This introduces also the need to distinguish between 
> absolute/relative/virtual/network/etc paths, that can vary on different 
> platforms. I doubt that just doing strcat() between the strings inside this 
> "synth.soundfont-dirs" and the string written on the command line will be 
> enough.
> 
> Although it may look useful for some typists, command auto-completation and 
> command history of the shells give already a solution.
> 
> Sincerely.
> 
>> Il 1 novembre 2018 alle 13.16 Tom <address@hidden> ha scritto: 
>> 
>> Per request I'm moving this discussion to the mailing list.
>> 
>> Motivation: https://github.com/FluidSynth/fluidsynth/issues/453
>> Current PR: https://github.com/FluidSynth/fluidsynth/pull/454
>> 
>> Essentially the feature would add an option called " synth.soundfont-dirs". 
>> I've chosen to make this a semi-colon delimited list, like 
>> "/usr/share/soundfonts/;~/.local/share/soundfonts" (on Windows, it's 
>> "C:/soundfonts/"). When specifying soundfonts on the command-line, the new 
>> functionality is to look for the soundfont in the current directory, and if 
>> it's not there, search the other directories. This is so the user does not 
>> need to specify an absolute path everytime.
>> 
>> Some of the concerns:
>> 
>> *   How to implement the default path (env. variable, 
>> dirname(synth.default-soundfont), custom path)?
>> IMO, the most intuitive place is to look in the current directory, then look 
>> in locations determined by the filesystem hierarchy (FHS, XDG, etc; and 
>> Windows equivalent). If we allow a run-time configurable option, the user 
>> can rearrange the search path too. 
>> 
>> *   Compile-time or run-time configurable?
>> Allow it to be compile-time configurable for maintainers to set a reasonable 
>> default, but also run-time configurable for user convenience. 
>> 
>> *   How to deal with other OSs?
>> See #1. 
>> 
>> *   How to deal with files that exist in this default directory as well as 
>> in the current working directory?
>> See #1. 
>> 
>> *   After all: Why not writing a simple shell script for your use-case?
>> 
>> Reducing duplication of effort. I think this patch is simple enough that the 
>> user convenience to dev implementation ratio is good enough. 
>> 
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