Re: [fluid-dev] fluidsynth bugs

[Matt Giuca]

Hi Victor,

> 1. It resets all channes to prg 1, so when you play a midifile, all we get is 
> piano from GM soundfonts. I have asked about this here, but no one responded. 
> With a call to
>
>  fluid_synth_sfload(synth, p->soundfont, 0);
>
>  it seems this behaviour is prevented. But there does not seem to be a 
> setting to prevent reset-presets in the fluidsynth program.

Aha! I found this bug about a month ago and looked around, but nobody
else seemed to have it (sorry if you asked, I didn't see it). I didn't
report it properly (does FS even have a bug tracker?), but I did
mention it here:
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/fluid-dev/2010-09/msg00006.html
and here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1564839

After many hours of debugging, I discovered that FluidSynth 1.1.2 had
been released, which fixes it. And it's not a trivial fix which can be
backported. In 1.1.2, they rewrote a lot of the threading code with
better locking, and it just went away (seemingly nobody reported this
particular problem, even though I was getting it almost consistently!)
So I believe it was just caused by some horrible race condition, and
fixed "accidentally".

So, the only solution is to update to 1.1.2. If you are using Ubuntu,
1.1.2 will make it into Maverick, but in the meantime, I have provided
a package for just this reason:
https://launchpad.net/~mgiuca/+archive/fluidsynth

Cheers
Matt