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

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

On Tuesday 06 September 2011, 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/.

openSUSE uses /usr/share/sounds/sf2 as well:
http://rpmfind.net//linux/RPM/opensuse/11.4/noarch/snd_sf2-0.1.2-666.1.noarch.html

Mandriva uses /usr/share/soundfonts
http://rpmfind.net//linux/RPM/mandriva/devel/cooker/sparc/media/contrib/release/fluid-soundfont-common-3.1-4mdv2011.0.noarch.html

> /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.
> 
> 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.

Note that soundfonts aren't used only by FluidSynth. Owners of Soundblaster SB 
Live and Audigy cards (and other models maybe) need to load soundfonts into the 
soundcard with Takashi's awesfx program:
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/tiwai/awesfx/

In openSUSE, the soundfont path and file names are configured using a variable 
named "SOUNDFONT_FILES" in /etc/sysconfig/sound which is sourced by an init 
script.

Regards,
Pedro