Re: [iiwusynth-devel] What I'm planning to do with iiwusynth

[Josh Green]

On Sat, 2003-02-15 at 18:13, Bob Ham wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I thought I'd write down some ideas I've been having for a frontend to
> iiwusynth in order to get reactions, suggestions, etc, so here goes.  I
> want to have a tabbed window where each tab represents one instance of
> iiwusynth.  In each you can edit all the settings for the instance; the
> soundfont stack, reverb, ladspa, etc.  Each instance would be running in
> the same program; ie I'm intending to do this via libiiwusynth rather
> than the command line or anything.  One thing that concerns me is the
> interface to synths' controls once they've been created.  There seems to
> be quite a few methods for telling the synth to do something; I've seen
> tcp server stuff, "shell" stuff and whatnot around in the includes and
> I'm not sure what's going on at a high level.  If someone could explain
> what these things are about I'd appreciate it.
> 

I have similar plans for Swami. This of course doesn't mean you
shouldn't go ahead and create your own program though :) Swami is using
FluidSynth as a plugin and the GUI elements are a plugin as well. So all
the access is done via the C API that FluidSynth has. I've been working
for quite some time re-writing the Swami API. Its all very object
oriented now (based on GObject), so one could say create multiple
instances of WavetableFluidSynth, etc.

Currently I'm using the FluidSynth driver system for audio and MIDI.
This may change in the future when I add other wavetable back ends or
find that I need to do audio output as well (previewing samples on disk
for instance).

There is still a lot of work to do though, so Swami 1.0 is still
somewhat "vaporware". The code is there though, and its starting to come
together. Soon, very soon..

> Another thing that could be a problem is each synth's jack client.  I'm
> not sure, but I suspect there might be Issues with more than one
> jack_client_t in a single address space.  It could mean having to make
> synths share the same jack client and have them do their jack processing
> via libiiwusynth.  That's not too big an issue tho and could dealt with
> quite cleanly I reckon.
> 

What particular uses do you see in having multiple FluidSynth instances?
I'm not saying I don't see any.. but perhaps some functionality could be
implemented in FluidSynth to make one instance sufficient.
Some reasons I could see for multiple FluidSynths:

- Expanding the # of MIDI channels. I believe this is solved by the MIDI
router that Markus is working on?

- Routing audio to different devices/programs. If multiple output driver
instances were allowed, one could route the audio to different devices
or Jack ports.

> Anyway, that's what I'm thinking about.
> 
> Bob
> 

Cheers.
        Josh Green