Re: [Alsa-devel] Audigy1 MIDI input, wavetable support?

Manuel Jander Fri, 07 Mar 2003 19:27:07 -0800

Hi,

I would like to comment something about that Software / Hardware wavetable issue:

-Most today soundboards use software wavetable anyway. So having one generic wavetable engine should work for all of them. The idea is to share the effort; one for all.

-Some soundcards if not all of them use multiple PCM channels using a hardware mixer and sometimes some hardware efects (modulation on the trident for example). I think, a good approach would be a software wavetable engine that makes use of as many hardware PCM channels as avaiable, and allows some kind of hardware effects through callbacks to set hardware effect parameters. If the driver developer lets them empty, just nothing happens or a software fallback is used.

Best Regards

Manuel Jander.

Josh Green wrote:

On Fri, 2003-03-07 at 07:44, Mark J Roberts wrote:

I am trying to load a soundfont into my Audigy1's wavetable and play
it with a MIDI keyboard. I am using kernel 2.5.64.

MIDI output verifiably works. However, MIDI input does not. The
cable and keyboard are not the problem--I've tried them with an
es1371, and I easily got MIDI input working.

My procedure with the Audigy1:

        cat /dev/snd/midiC0D0
        watch /proc/interrupts
        watch /proc/asound/Audigy/midi0

No interrupts occur and no bytes are read. I have also tried using
aconnect to connect the inputs. Does anyone else see this behavior?

I've got one more question. What program should I use to configure
the wavetable and load the soundfonts? I found a couple versions of
"awesfx", neither of which was compatible with my ALSA.


I know that ALSA contains support for the wavetable of the EMU8k and
EMU10k series of cards (AWE 32/64 and Live! respectively). I'm not
absolutely sure whether the wavetable on the Audigy is also supported,
but chances are it is. The SoundFont loading API is OSS based, but ALSA
uses it so awesfx (sfxload utility, etc) should work (provided the API
is actually there for the Audigy).
I'm convinced that software synthesis is the way to go. It allows for
easier routing of the synthesized data (via Jack for example) and
supports any sound card. This is the approach I have gone with with
Swami (http://swami.sourceforge.net) the successor to the Smurf
SoundFont Editor which was based on the OSS awesfx API. Swami uses
FluidSynth (http://www.fluid-synth.org - was previously called
iiwusynth) to do software synthesis of SoundFont files. Using software
synthesis gives us these additional features over current Linux
supported hardware solutions:

- Modulator support, allowing for real time modulation of effects with
MIDI controllers (or with GUI controls from Swami)
- Customizable Reverb/Chorus (EMU10k doesn't have support for these
effects in Linux)
- Routing of audio via Jack, opening up a whole world of audio
processing, effects, etc.

The downside is of course the CPU usage, so in the future I will likely
be re-adding support to Swami for the hardware wavetable OSS API.

If you want to check these projects out, you can either wait a few days
for FluidSynth 1.0 to be released which a release of Swami will follow
shortly after, or you can get Swami CVS and FluidSynth CVS. Cheers.
        Josh Green

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Re: [Alsa-devel] Audigy1 MIDI input, wavetable support?

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