Hallo, Larry Troxler hat gesagt: // Larry Troxler wrote:
Frank, I haven't heard from Norbert Schnell yet about his ideas about Max/PD compatibility; Is Norbert.Schnell@ircam.fr his current e-mail address?
That's the one I only have as well, and I think it's correct.
The whole issue of how this should work is still murky in my mind. I realized another problem with the [ fluid~ drums.sf2 DRUMS] creation syntax; not only is there a problem with creating a fluid in the DRUMS group loading a different font, but to be consistent with a creation soundfont being equivalent to a load, then if you were to duplicate this object, then each you would end up with n instances of a a shared soundfont loaded n times into each fluid~ (since there is no check against loading a sounfont twice).
I'm almost tempted to consider a completely different approach: let's forget about the "group" idea and to just have the fluid~ load message (or creation-time soundfont) share a soundfont if the filename strings are equal. Of course, on most OS's, the same file can be reached by more than one pathname string, but I don't think it's a problem to require them to be referred to the same way if you want to share the soundfont.
This would require that a "reload" message be implemented, in case the soundfont file has indeed changed and you _do_ want to load it again. I seem to remember either a fluidsynth API for this, and/or that Norbert Schnell has already implemented reload in his Max version.
Checking, what new features are in fluidsynth~ and how Norbert realized them is still on my Todo-list, which is a bit crammed currently, as usual...
The filename approach sounds like a simple and easy solution. I'm curious which you decided on in the end.
Man oh man, this is sure taking more thought than I anticipated. This is one of those cases where a feature is trivial to implement for my own use, but more involved than it should be to get working in a way that makes sense for everyone. It's especially a shame because I doubt the shared soundfont feature would be important to most of the people who use fluid~. Plus, it's kind of a kludge anyway; really it would be best if we could get the fluidsynth API to give seperate audio outputs for each voice (and then also specify which output a given note event goes to).
I think, I remember that there indeed was talk about something like this on the fluid-dev list. In the end, having this inside fluidsynth would be the best solution.
Regarding bundling a soundfont with fluid~: There is a coll soundfont called "MiniPiano" available on hammersound.com, which is really tiny. It can be freely distributed for "non-commercial use" only, though.
A nice GPL Rhodes piano soundfont is available here: http://www.yeeking.net/index.php?location=Sound%20Fonts At 3.7M it's not that small and sometimes has problems with fluid~.
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org__