Re: [Linuxsampler-devel] RAM sampler module proposal

[Josh G. <jg...@us...>]

On Thu, 2002-11-07 at 08:14, Benno Senoner wrote:
>
> Steve, Josh:
> Regarding the IIWU synth I tried it today in conjunction with with the 
> large fluid sound font:
> http://inanna.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~swh/fluid-unpacked/
> 
> IIWU/Fluid sounds quite nice but it seems to be quite CPU heavy.
> I took a look at the voice generation routines and it is all pretty much
> "hard coded" plus it uses integer math (integer,fractional parts etc)
> which is not that efficient as you might think.
> I tested it on my dual Celeron 366 and when playing MIDI files it often
> cannot keep up because the CPU load goes to 100%.
> The same MIDI file played in Timidity on the same box works ok without
>  drop outs.
> I do not want to criticize IIWU here, I think the authors have done
> quite a nice work but I don't see it suitable as base for our "sampler
> constrution kit" or like Steve H. said "maybe the question should be
> whether it's easier to add disk streaming to FluidSynth".
> I know some of you want quick results or say "if we set the target too
>  high we will not reach it and developers might loose interest etc",
> but I think the open source world still lack a very well thought out,
>  flexible and efficient sampling engine and this takes some time.
> Sure, we can learn a lot from Fluid, perhaps turning it into a SoundFont
> playback module for LinuxSampler but I do not envision LinuxSampler as
>  an extension of Fluid.  
> 

My main interest, as far as contribution to LinuxSampler, is concerning
patch manipulation and GUI editor front end. I think the goals of Swami
fit in with this, and welcome any comments agreeing or disagreeing with
that. I'm not a direct developer of FluidSynth (beyond tracking down
bugs and suggesting things), so I can't really answer specifics about
it.

I was not necessarily suggesting that LinuxSampler should be based off
of FluidSynth, only that there is probably a bit of information that
could be gained from existing projects such as that one.

As to performance, I'm not really familiar with Timidity's SoundFont
capabilities. It seems a bit crude to me to just compare them side by
side without knowing what features are enabled. For instance Timidity
might not have Reverb/Chorus enabled by default. There have also been
some recent gains in performance in CVS. That being said, I really
should check out Timidity's capabilities sometime (I have never actually
had it working, although admittedly I have not tried for a while).

While performance with FluidSynth leaves a lot to be desired, it does
have a fairly complete implementation of the SoundFont specification
(still missing some things though).

> 
> cheers
> Benno
> 

Cheers.
	Josh Green