[Fwd: Re: [iiwusynth-devel] update and todo list]

[Bob Ham]

On Mon, 2002-06-03 at 00:37, Peter Hanappe wrote:
> We also handle 'bank select' and 'sustain' messages. We still have
> to handle the 'soft', 'sustenuto', 'all sound off', 'reset controller',
> and 'all notes off' messages. Most importantly, we have to implement
> the NRPN mechanism (SF2 specs, p. 75), which could be a lot of fun.

> it's very important to have a modular design
> so both can still work independently. This is important as a general
> design concept but also because people are using iiwusynth as a
> standalone library on linux

Indeed they are, MusE being an example.  It's my intention to write a
softsynth plugin for muse that uses iiwusynth through the library
interface (the current synth has some hacked up iiwu sources.)

Something that's stuck in my mind about iiwu is the soundfont stack
business.  I'd love to be able to simply load many soundfonts into an
iiwusynth and be able to select between them using a bank select control
message (which would need to be the MSB as iiwusynth uses the LSB to
switch between sf2 banks IIRC.)  This would be in addition to the
iiwusynth stack (in fact, switching between stacks is what I'm
thinking.) That would allow you to use soundfonts whose presets
overlap.  At the moment, I'm think of doing it outside of iiwusynth, in
the plugin.  My concern is that there will be one iiwu engine running
for each soundfont, which seems like unnecessary CPU usage.   I assume
it would be possible to do it within iiwusynth, but I don't know the
code, so I'm throwing it out there as a request to put on the TODO list
:)

Also, ideally, I'd be able to have individual sound outputs (ie, many
calls of iiwu_synth_write_*, or equivalent,) one for each of the 16
channels, or perhaps arbitrarily many channels, with alsa seq ports
added as required.

Any way, just some thoughts,

Bob

-- 
Bob Ham: address@hidden  http://pkl.net/~node/

My music: http://mp3.com/obelisk_uk
GNU Hurd: http://hurd.gnu.org/