Re: [fluid-dev] Compiling on Windows - how to use --fast-render?

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

On Saturday 10 March 2012, Dr.Leo wrote:
> 1. MSVC9
> 
> I did not manage to build it. It does not even build libfluidsynth.lib. 
> Is there something wrong with the SLN file? Well, cmake produced an 
> error at some point that did not look serious but may have disrupted the 
> build process. If anyone is interested I'll send the log files etc. 

I would try to help if you post a brief message containing the error messages, 
and the exact versions of the software packages involved.

By the way, I've built FluidSynth SVN with VC++ 2010 Express just now, 
successfully. I've used:

From http://www.cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html
- CMake 2.8.7, 

From http://www.gtk.org/download/win32.php
- GLib 2.28.8 (Run-time, Dev) 
- gettext-runtime 0.18.1.1 (Run-time, Dev)
- pkg-config 0.26 (Tool)

CMake complains about the VC Redist runtime files, which are not included in 
Express anymore, but it is a warning not affecting the build at all.

> Strangely enough, MSVC9 did not complain about a missing dsound.h etc.

The DirectX SDK is included in Visual Studio, even in VS Express.

> I think it would be very useful to host a zip archive with the binaries 
> on sf. If you haven't got a Win32 build environment I'd happily send you 
> my .exe and .dll plus a readme file.

The problem is that we don't want to decide a particular configuration and 
compiler version to distribute an official Windows build. We don't do that for 
Mac OSX or Linux either. Building all permutations is out of the question: 
there are two compilers (VC++ and MinGW), two main architectures (32 and 64 
bit), and several optional dependencies...

Building the binaries depends on the exact requirements of each program/user 
using FluidSynth. For instance, including Readline changes the license of the 
resulting library from LGPL to GPL, and this may be discouraging for some 
users. Other optional components in Windows can be Sndfile, Portaudio, and 
Jack. Each one has specific use cases and drawbacks, which are justified if 
you really need the functionality (for instance, if you include some of them 
you need to distribute also their runtime DLL as well.)

> 3. fast-render
> 
> I don't understand the syntax. I tried from the cmd line:
> 
> fluidsynth r3.sf2 -f=output.raw input.mid
> 
> and it just plays the midi file without writing anything. Any hint would 
> be much appreciated.

The short argument for fast render is "-F", with a capital F letter. In this 
case, followed by an space and the name of the output file name. The long 
argument is "--fast-render", followed by an equal sign ("=") and the output 
file name. Without the help of Readline, the command line options must go 
before the soundfont and midi file names. So, two correct commands would be:

        fluidsynth -F output.raw r3.sf2 input.mid 

or

        fluidsynth --fast-render=output.raw r3.sf2 input.mid 

Regards,
Pedro