[iiwusynth-devel] Jamming with FluidSynth :)

[Josh Green]

Well, I had my first successful jam with FluidSynth/Swami at a party a
few days ago. I finally got all my self made instruments tuned and also
used a moog SoundFont I got off the net. My setup consists of a PII-366
laptop running Debian Linux, Swami and FluidSynth with a PCR-50 USB
synthesizer keyboard connected to it (MIDI controller knobs are mapped
to effects using the new "Session Modulators" feature in Swami, rather
than having to define the same modulators for every instrument).

Everything seemed to work pretty well (it was really cool actually). The
only thing that is still scaring me is the filter/reverb stability
problems. Since we were using quite large speakers, having a blast of
max volume white noise could be potentially deafening :(  Luckily this
problem only surfaced a couple times and I was able to detect the
condition and change filter parameters with only some loud bass booooms
(probably not even noticed amongst the rest of the clammer of 2 guitars,
1 bass guitar, 2 drum sets, clarinet and several hand drums).

I think this problem should be priority relating to synthesis bugs. Has
anyone else experienced this same behavior? I wrote a test case in an
email a while back. Its really cool that FluidSynth is so close to being
a dependable live performance instrument :) Cheers!
        Josh Green