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

[Tom M.]

Thanks for the feedback guys!
 
I share the concerns brought up here and agree that this is no suitable feature 
for the fluidsynth library. I.e. the current proposal to make it a FluidSetting 
and expose a find_soundfont() function via the API is not suitable.
 
IMO this should be implemented as exclusive feature for the executable. 
Preferably **not** as compile time option. A normal user who acutally benefits 
from this feature should not dependent on any compile flags a packager has or 
hasn't specified when compiling fluidsynth.

Keep in mind that synth.default-soundfont approaches a similar problem using a 
cmake flag. However I couldn't find any distribution (ubuntu, megeia, fedora, 
openSUSE) making use of this.

I propose to keep it simple and implement this using an environment variable: 
If a soundfont specified on the commandline isn't found in the current working 
directory, the fluidsynth exec. looks through the $PATH variable and takes the 
first one it finds. The user only needs to setup up this env. var. in his 
~/.bash.rc or similar. Ofc. we could also use a custom env. variable.  I like 
$PATH because it's convenient on *nix and Windows.

Also when implementing this, I suggest to remove synth.default-soundfont and 
possibly also the DEFAULT_SOUNDFONT cmake flag. After all, the current 
implementation only uses the default soundfont when the user plays back a MIDI 
file.

Tom