Re: [fluid-dev] Supported Wave/Flac format other than SF2

[David Henningsson]

On 2015-02-05 22:21, David Henningsson wrote:
> I guess this depends on your level of ambition. I believe - correct me
> if I'm wrong - that for the (open source) sf2 playback engines out
> there, FluidSynth is the top notch one, in terms of following the
> specification.
>
> Sure, we could "just transfer it in", but then again, the results would
> be slightly wrong. Just as an example, sfz seems to have a three band EQ
> built into every voice [1], which SF2 voices do not. This is stuff we
> would have to add into the playback engine.
>
> If we should bring SFZ into the engine, then my wish would be that the
> goal should be to play it as perfect as SF2 files are played today.
> (Sure, we can have a few releases along the way where we're open with
> that SFZ is not perfect yet, and that we plan to improve the support
> later.)

To sum up a little - we're all different. Some of us care about SF2, 
others care more about SFZ. Some of us are perfectionist and want our 
instruments to sound exactly the way we intended, others prefer a 
good-enough approach.

For my own part, I'm a little afraid that if we do SFZ with a good 
enough approach and SF2 perfectly, then some people would judge 
FluidSynth by the way we play SFZ and think that we're not doing SF2 
perfectly either. But maybe that's just me.

Also,

As you all probably know, nobody spends a lot of time on this project 
currently. Which means two things:

 1) sure, you can come and ask for features such as SFZ support, 24-bit 
samples, etc, but don't expect anyone to work on them unless you do it 
yourself, and submit patches etc. (To first have a heads up and quick 
discussion about the implementation would be appreciated.)

 2) if you'd like to help out or even take over maintenance of 
FluidSynth, the door is open. If you'd be willing to do that work (and 
has done so for a while), at least I would not want to stand in the way 
of moving FluidSynth in the direction you want.

// David