Re: [yoshimi-user] Yoshimi Fails on Xrun!

[Will J G. <Wil...@mu...>]

On Sun, 18 Jul 2010 22:51:21 -0300
Ivan Hernandez <ihe...@ki...> wrote:

> Ok. I love Yoshimi, but i'm having problems with it. On my setup, a Ubuntu Linux 10.04 amd64, a single Xrun kills Yoshimi. I mean... interface keeps running but there is no more sound. No yoshimi output to connect on jack, no midi input, no nothing. And nothing makes it come back to life except closing it and staring it again.
<snip> 
> QSynth and QSampler does not give me that kind of headaches, nor it does Hydrogen, Exaile (the media player) and even Mednafen, the NES and Famicom emulator that has Jack support survives to XRuns. So it seems that Yoshimi is the problem, and it's something that was introduced on the 2.4 version of ZynAddSubFX. ZynAddSubFX 2.2 works really far from sweet with jack, but survives to zruns a lot better.

This is a really, really bad comparison.

Obligatory car analogy:

QSynth is a drive along a straight, wide, almost new highway with only
2 other cars in sight on a moderate overcast day in a Ford Fiesta
at around 40MPH

Yoshimi is a white-knuckle trip over a Swiss mountain pass in a
blizzard, at night, facing donkeys, trucks and bandits in an
open-frame kit car doing 90+

Samplers simply grab a sample, spit it out, wait, grab a sample, etc.
The really 'sophisticated' ones change sample bank dependent on the
incoming MIDI velocity.

Zyn/Yoshimi mathematically calculates every single element of every
single sound AT THE SAME TIME as sending it's output to jack or
wherever.

Zyn 2.2 was a pioneer of soft synths but had very poor jack integration,
and was quite capable of completely locking your entire machine when it
zombified. In fact my standard way of using it was to set up voice
patches. Save the complete parameter block. Quit Zyn, then restart by
loading in the saved parameters with the -l option. It was the only way
I could be certain of getting right through a track without problems.

Zyn. 2.4 solved most of these problems, but at the cost of higher
CPU usage and great damage to the sound output when under heavy CPU
load.

Yoshimi is whittling away all of these problems. It runs faster (less
CPU overhead) than either version of Zyn. and very rarely gives me
significant problems.

Having said that, I would never run any soft-synth on a laptop except
with the most basic voice patches, and with absolutely nothing more
than a sequencer or MIDI interface on the same machine. I've run
Yoshimi on an eeePC - just!

-- 
Will J Godfrey
http://www.musically.me.uk
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.