[PlanetCCRMA] [Fedora-music-list] Re: for MIDI lovers: fluidsynth update

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 23:11 -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 4:29 PM, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
> > fluidsynth-1.0.9 is available in Fedora's updates-testing repository.
> > This release comes with many improvements and fixes outlined in [1].
> > The most important improvement seems to be the new native Jack MIDI
> > driver. fluidsynth MIDI connections will now appear in qjackctl's or
> > your favorite jack controller's MIDI tab.
> >
> > If you are interested to try out, please update with
> > # yum --enablerepo updates-testing update fluidsynth-libs
> >
> > So far, I didn't encounter any problems with this new version with
> > fluidsynth using applications. If no problems are reported I will push
> > this update to stable repo in about 2 weeks.
> >
> > [1] http://fluidsynth.resonance.org/trac/wiki/ChangeLog1_0_9
> >
> 
> It seems to me that the new fluidsynth is not that stable. I start
> qjackctl which runs jackd (this is Fedora's jack 0.116.1-5) with
> /usr/bin/jackd -R -dalsa -dhw:0 -r44100 -p1024 -n2 -Xseq
> Then I start qsynth. As soon as I do this jack starts getting very
> many xruns and in about 10 seconds qjackctl exits with a SIGKILL, also
> killing jackd with itself along the way.
> 
> Now I start qjackctl once more and click on "Restart" on already
> running qsynth. This time there are no xruns and jackd runs without
> problems.
> 
> It's not desirable to use jack always with this workaround and I am
> not pushing the package to stable until the issue is resolved.
> 
> Fernando, do you still develop jack? 

No, sorry, I don't...

> Do you know where the problem might be? 

It would seem to be some sort of caching problem. That is, the first
time fluidsynth is starting up and reading the soundfont, the second
time the soundfont is already in memory. This should not happen, of
course, as the process callback in fluidsynth should not be doing any
file i/o directly (or be influenced by it). 

Is this happening with the standard Fedora kernel or the rt kernel?

What happens if you change the soundfont while fluid is running happily
the second time?

> As soon as I downgrade to fluidsynth-1.0.8 these symptoms
> disappear.

-- Fernando