Re: [fluid-dev] parallel loading of soundfont samples

[Hamish Moffatt]

On 27/10/20 6:27 pm, Marcus Weseloh wrote:
> Thinking about this some more...
>
> If I interpret your question as "What is the fastest way to load a
> whole Soundfont on app startup?", then my answer would be: simply load
> an SF2 file.

Hi Marcus, thanks for considering my idea. As you guessed, I'm using SF3 
to reduce the size of my distribution. I could convert to SF2 on first 
load, if I had for that. Using a regular compressor like zip on the SF2 
is not very effective.

I did look through the sfloader code and I can see it's not easy to 
restructure it to use multiple threads. I could easily arrange to load 
my two soundfonts in a thread each but I don't think the API allows for 
this.

My two SF3s take about 3.5 seconds each to load, spent in 
fluid_synth_sfload(). This is on a fast CPU (i9-9900k). Anyway, I've 
actually since implemented Reinhold's suggestion:


On 27/10/20 7:14 pm, Reinhold Hoffmann wrote:
> We use SF3 files for some years now due to the reasons Marcus outlined below
> and where faced with the same problem of long loading times. As a solution
> SF3 soundfonts are loaded in the background where the app is already up and
> ready for the user but the sound subsystem is not yet ready.

In most cases my users won't need the synth until it's ready anyway, so 
I load the soundfonts on a background thread and only block if the user 
starts to use the synth before the loading completes.

Still, I think parallel loading of the soundfonts would be a good 
optimization that would benefit every application using Fluidsynth.


cheers,

Hamish