Re: [fluid-dev] Defining a standard directory for soundfonts Was: First Try Failure

[Orcan Ogetbil]

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 9:39 AM, David Henningsson wrote:
> On 09/06/2011 12:24 PM, Matt Giuca wrote:
>>
>> That's a good idea. That way, you would be able to just type
>> 'fluidsynth<midifile>' to play a song.
>>
>> Can I also recommend having a standard environment variable
>> SOUNDFONTPATH or similar which contains a colon-separated (semicolon
>> on Windows) list of paths to search for soundfonts. That would be
>> similar to LD_LIBRARY_PATH, Java's CLASSPATH or Python's PYTHONPATH
>> which I can set in my .bashrc file to customise where I keep my
>> SoundFonts. This would be searched in addition to (and in preference
>> to) the default path.
>>
>> Which distros use /usr/share/soundfonts/ to store the soundfonts?
>> Debian (or at least Ubuntu, so I assume Debian) uses
>> /usr/share/sounds/sf2/.
>
> /usr/share/soundfonts/ was just my personal preference. I don't mind
> adhering to what Debian/Ubuntu currently does, although I vaguely recall
> that Fedora might have had a different path.
>

For the last 2.5 years, Fedora has been using /usr/share/soundfonts/
as the default soundfont path, and the default soundfont is
/usr/share/soundfonts/default.sf2

This file is actually a symlink to the actual default soundfont, which
for the time being, is /usr/share/soundfonts/FluidR3_GM.sf2. This file
(and the symlink) is provided by the fluid-soundfont package, rather
than the fluidsynth package.

We also use a patch for qsynth to load this default soundfont by
default when no other soundfonts are listed in qsynth's interface. But
it would be nice to have this done at fluidsynth level.


> But I'm not completely sure about the SOUNDFONTPATH thing - how would that
> be used? Is that just to make people write foo.sf2 instead of
> /usr/share/soundfonts/foo.sf2? It still wouldn't give FluidSynth itself
> something to load as fallback.
>

I am not sure environment variables are the right solution. Sounds a
bit old-fashioned to me.

Orcan