Re: [Rosegarden-devel] First impressions

[Shelagh M. <she...@gm...>]

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:56:23 +0200
Vladimir Savic
<vla...@gm...> wrote:

> D. Michael McIntyre wrote:
> > On Monday 21 April 2008, Shelagh Manton wrote:
> > 
> >> Timidity is the least intrusive option.
> > 
> > Well, you have a point.  His thinking was that for people who have
> > one, the asfxload route is the best thing to try first.  It is, and
> > I can agree with that, but on second thought, let's look at the
> > first part of my book as an example of why it's a bad idea to try
> > to go that route.
> 
> Now I'm in standing at the crossroad of my own thinkings...
> 
> Will we chose the simplest way for everyone or simplest way for a
> person with given audio setup? Another one would be: what about
> out-of-the-box ability of recording midi tracks into audio track?
> 
> Made up my mind... Timidity*! It's old - it's everywhere. It's easy 
> installable.
> 
> And the big thing for some of the musicians (not me, though) is 
> rendering midi to audio. Timidity* can do this easily.
> 
> *Timidity is old and CPU hungry. Unfortunately, fluidsynth will not
> have non-realtime midi to soundfile rendering before version 2.
> 
> > The least common denominator approach is probably the more sensible
> > one.  I still wouldn't go for TiMidity + Freepats though, because
> > it sounds like complete bleck.  If the Ubuntu people manage to get
> > TiMidity to use Fluid Soundfont (TiMidity can play .sf2 soundfonts,
> > but it's not as simple as just pointing it at one, and having it
> > work) then that's a great Plan A for the lowest common denominator
> > approach.  (Unless we want to think about RAM requirements.  That
> > soundfont is actually too large to use with asfxload. It's huge.)
> > Freepats really does sound terrible though.  It's based on old
> > samples that sounded great on a GUS about 15 years ago or
> > something, but times have changed.
> 
> All you've said is the voice of common sense. My only concern is
> time. When will fluid-R2D2-soundfont be released? How much 'free' it
> will be? Will we be able to pack it in .rpm and .ebuild?

I notice that fluid-soundfont is already available for hardy in two
packages, the base package for gm midi and a gs add-on package. 

They are available in debian sid also so I imagine the licencing issues
are OK for most other distros? I notice that CCRMA has a version of
this sound font too so there are obviously rpm spec files around. But I
can find no record of an ebuild or even that gentoo know about this
soundfont. (But that might just be my lack of skill in googling).

Are we thinking of bundling these apps or just crossing our
fingers and hoping that they are available for recommended packages in each distro?

Really the timidity might be a required  or recommended package but the
soundfont has to be the distro's choice even if it is blech!

Shelagh
> 
> Vlada
> 
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