[fluid-dev] How to send manual midi commands to fluidsynth from another program?

[John O'Hagan]

Hi,

I'm writing an algorithmic music program which generates lists of numbers 
representing notes and durations. The results can be printed as scores and 
played as midi files using lilypond, and to play the results as they are 
generated (i.e., bar by bar), I'm using the sox synth.

That's pretty limited, however, so I thought that fluidsynth might be the way 
forward. 

The simplest solution would be to translate my number lists into noteon 
commands, etc, and pipe them to fluidsynth.

But I need a little help understanding the fluidsynth shell. 

When that is active, I can type commands in, but I cant figure out how to pipe 
them from my program. I tried sending a file object to stdout but it seemed 
to just disappear. Also, when I try to run fluidsynth with the -i switch, (no 
shell), it seems to start up, then immediately exit.

I can get a result by translating my data  into a text-to-midi program, then 
piping that to, say, pmidi, which plays via fluidsynth, but that seems very 
roundabout.

Any advice?

Regards, 

John O'Hagan