Read Me

Introduction
============

The Realbasic FluidSynth Wrapper provides classes to use the FluidSynth library
with REALbasic. It provides a rather high-level-implementation so that you
don't need to do stuff like creating a new settings instance, a new synthesizer
instance etc. For more information on FluidSynth and getting its source code,
visit http://www.fluidsynth.org/.

Getting FluidSynth
==================

The Wrapper currently comes without the FluidSynth library itself, so you need
to compile the library from source. If you're a Mac user, there's also an
unstable fink package available. Windows users may find this guide for compiling
FluidSynth helpful:

http://www.mail-archive.com/fluid-dev@nongnu.org/msg00745.html

Most Linux distributions have FluidSynth in their repositories.

After installing FluidSynth, you may need to change the constant fsLibrary in
the FluidLibraryAccess class according to the location you installed FluidSynth
at.

The GUI
=======

The Wrapper comes with a simple GUI that demonstrates the currently implemented
features. This GUI is not intended to be a FluidSynth frontend, even if you
could use it as one. Its purpose is to test and debug the Wrapper.

Using the Wrapper in your application
=====================================

To use the Wrapper, you need to add all files in the FluidSynth folder to your
application. You can then create an instance of the FluidSynth class in your
code, which will give you access to the library functions. (I might do some
documentation on the usage of the Wrapper in the future. For now, refer to
the example implementation in the GUI and the information on the FluidSynth
homepage.)

Spreading your application with FluidSynth
==========================================

On Windows, the fluidsynth.dll is known to work on any system that has
DirectX installed, so you can simply bundle it with your application when
spreading it. On MacOSX, the fluidsynth.dylib seems not to work on another
system if you simply copy it there. Another problem is that a fink installation
moves the library to /sw/lib/ (which is where the fsLibrary constant currently
points at), but if you compile it from source, it will be located at
/usr/local/lib/. Work on this issue is in progress. On Linux, the best thing to
do is probably spreading your application as rpm or deb package with FluidSynth
as dependency.