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

[Orcan Ogetbil]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 11:23 PM, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 23:11 -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
>>
>> 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?
>

This is Fedora kernel
2.6.29.4-167.fc11.x86_64
I'll see what happens with the rt kernel.

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

When I select a different soundfont in the second run of fluidsynth,
nothing bad happens. Things continue to work properly.

Another test I have made is: I ran jackd without the -R (realtime)
flag. This time when I start qsynth, I get lots of xruns again but
this time qjackctl does not shut down and continues to report the
xruns.

Can you (or anyone) reproduce any of these results?

Orcan