Re: [fluid-dev] FluidSynth with Win32/.NET front end

[Josh Green]

Hello Chris,

On Mon, 2008-03-31 at 08:12 -0700, Chris McLennan wrote:
> Hello FluidSynth group,
>  
> I have been testing FluidSynth and looking at the source for the last
> week or so under Win32.  I was really interested to see the --server
> option on the man page... but after looking at the source I see that
> this hasn't been implemented for Windows.  Has anyone already wrapped
> FluidSynth for use w/ Win32 or .NET apps?   Looking at the source,
> it's probably not a trivial amount of work to do this.  So I'm hoping
> if someone has done this they would be willing to share what
> they know?

I'm not sure about FluidSynth and .NET myself.  I wouldn't think it
would require much effort for someone to write --server support for
Windows, since I think its also based on the BSD sockets library.

This is also another area where FluidSynth could benefit by moving to a
portability library like glib, which has some helper code for this kind
of stuff.  I'm starting to be more and more convinced that this is a
good idea.

>  
> FYI: I got some great sounding results with FluidSynth at a recording
> session over the weekend using a Dell PC w/ some generic sound
> card!  However, I had some latency that I could not get rid of and had
> to use a different synth module for tracking.   I'm going to try to
> install it on another computer and compare the latencies.  Any advice
> on this topic would also be great!

Nice to hear you are using FluidSynth for actually making some music :)
As for latency..  I'm not really sure what to suggest for windows.  I
would try modifying the buffer size and count parameters (-z and -c
respectively).  You might end up getting underruns though (clicks or
other artifacts in the output).  Some examples of values to try (keep in
mind, that as you move down the list, your OS becomes a critical factor
in providing you with low latency artifact free audio output):

-z 512 -c 2
-z 256 -c 2
-z 128 -c 2
-z 64 -c 2

>  
> Regards,
>  
> Chris McLennan
>  

Best regards,
        Josh