Re:[fluid-dev] Dealing with startup

[John O'Hagan]

Ben Leggett wrote:

>[...]
>Currently, I start fluidsynth in a shell script in conjunction with
>Dosbox, as opposed to systemwide, since the soundfont I use makes
>fluidsynth take up quite a lot of memory.
>
>Because this soundfont is large, fluidsynth startup time can take quite
>a while, and can vary depending on whether it's a cold start or not.
>
>Is there a way in a shell script to tell if fluidsynth has finished
>loading a font? Using "sleep" doesn't always produce the desired
>effects, since the load time is, as I said, quite variable. To recap, I
>need a way to wait for fluidsynth to finish loading before I start
>anything else.

I recently came across the same issue; I dealt with it (in Python) by using a 
while loop  to keep trying to connect to fluidsynth server at its "localhost 
9800" address:

        
        from telnetlib import Telnet
        import subprocess

        host = "localhost"
        port = "9800"

        #See if fluidsynth is already running:
        
        try:
                fluid = Telnet( host, port )

        #if not, load it:
                
        except:

                soundfont = "path_to_my_soundfont"
                
                subprocess.Popen( ["fluidsynth", "-i", "-s",  soundfont] )

                #While that's happening, keep trying to connect:
                
                while 1:
                        try:    
                                fluid = Telnet( host, port )
                        except:
                                continue
                        else:
                                break

        #After break, move on to rest of program

It's probably wise to put a timeout in there somewhere, but you get the idea.

In a shell script, you could probably do something similar with telnet or 
netcat.

Hopefully someone will point out if this is a bad way to do it!

HTH,

John