Re: Frescobaldi, improve support for audio export

[David Wright]

On Fri 18 Oct 2019 at 23:14:30 (+0100), Lilypond-User wrote:
> On 18/10/2019 22:06, Urs Liska wrote:
> > Am 18. Oktober 2019 22:45:28 MESZ schrieb Karlin High <address@hidden>:
> >> On 10/18/2019 3:17 PM, Guy Stalnaker wrote:
> >>> So, it looks like VLC with the right syntax may be able to use 
> >>> FluidSynth/soundfont to "play" midi and FFMpeg to encode to AAC or other 
> >>> codecs - or - output WAV file as input to lame
> >>>
> >>> It's a complicated commandline but I've seen (and created) worse LOL
> > 
> > Complicated is not an issue - that's what Frescobaldi can manage. It has to 
> > be reliable and ideally cross-platform
> > 
> Anyone planning on using VLC on Fedora, RHEL or CentOS needs to check
> out the current situation.  For RHEL/CentOS AIUI:
> 
> 7.7   VLC from the usual sources does not work (in fact crashes some updates).
> 8.0   VLC is not available.
> 
> There is a VLC available through flatpack, but I've not used it (so
> therefore cannot comment), but have seen warnings that it will pull in
> up to 1.2 GiB of other packages including the complete KDE implementation.

Perhaps much of this is because VL stands for Video-LAN, neither of
which has much to do with MIDI→MP3.

Quite honestly, I'm not sure I see the wisdom of bundling in any
or all of VLC into Frescobaldi. The hiatus in support of MIDI by
Windows versions 2.1.0 up gives an example of the kind of problems
that can ensue.

I would have thought that people who convert their MIDI files would
(a) have access to platform-appropriate tools already, (b) perhaps
want to use different soundfonts from those supplied, and (c) want
to use such tools on MIDI files that don't originate from F~ and LP.

Cheers,
David.