Hi, I am the lead developer of the Music Player Daemon project, and I have written a fluidsynth plugin for it:
http://git.musicpd.org/cgit/master/mpd.git/tree/src/decoder/fluidsynth_plugin.c There were lots of difficulties during the development, and I couldn't solve some of them. Let me drop a load of rants: - the API expects "char*" parameters, but I have only "const char*" - that means I have to duplicate all strings which are passed to fluidsynth. - fluidsynth is undocumented. http://www.nongnu.org/fluid/api/ lists just the prototypes http://www.toncat.de/fluidsynth/ and http://personales.ya.com/berarma/fluidsynth/html/ are a good start, but so incomplete that they're mostly unusable. Most of the time, I had to read fluidsynth's source, or the source of applications using fluidsynth. For my purposes, there is no good sample code. - there is no way to tell whether the "player" has finished playing a MIDI file - the "status" attribute is not exposed. Even the "fluidsynth" program does not exit when the song is finished, because it doesn't know either. - the "player" insists on playing in real-time, all my attempts to fill MPD's internal audio buffer as fast as possible failed, there was only silence in the buffer after the fluid_synth_write_s16() call. The same might be true when MPD is paused - I suspect fluidsynth will continue playback, but havn't tried yet (wasted more than enough time with figuring out the API). I don't want fluidsynth to make any assumptions on the wall clock - I want to read PCM samples out of it whenever I feel like doing so, as fast as the CPU can handle it. Just like all the other decoder libraries. - error handling in fluidsynth is awful. Most functions return an undocumented "int", its meaning can only be derived from reading the source, but I cannot grasp what's gone wrong, I cannot generate a usable error message. Non-fatal errors (as well as fatal errors) are printed to the log file, but the logging subsystem of fluidsynth is not thread safe (i.e. thread aware), so I cannot use the logging callback as a hack. In general, libraries shouldn't log at all, they should return good error codes/messages in some way. The application should decide what to do when an error occurs. - I don't want fluidsynth to create a new thread. Synthesize the MIDI file synchronously in the thread which called the library. Please keep me on Cc in responses, because I'm not subscribed to the mailing list. Max _______________________________________________ fluid-dev mailing list fluid-dev@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-dev
