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

[David Henningsson]

On 09/06/2011 08:29 PM, Stefan Kost wrote:
> On 09/06/11 15:39, 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.
> >
> > 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.
>
> The idea of the path is that it can be extended. E.g. the system uses
> SOUNDFONTPATH=/usr/share/sounds/sf2/. Now the user wants to download own
> soundfonts to $HOME/sounds/sf2. Then the user just adds
> SOUNDFONTPATH=$SOUNDFONTPATH:$HOME/sounds/sf2 and apps using soundfonts
> would consider that directory too. Apps could present the available
> soundfonts as a flat combobox with a lst of patches.

Ok, good point. Maybe there are a usage cases for both?

Thanks also to Pedro and Orcan for looking up the current situation in 
major distros. Let me summarise:

Debian (and derivatives such as Ubuntu):
Directory: /usr/share/sounds/sf2
File: N/A

Fedora:
Directory: /usr/share/soundfonts
File: /usr/share/soundfonts/default.sf2

OpenSuse:
Directory: /usr/share/sounds/sf2
File: N/A, but can be set by user through a SOUNDFONT_FILES environment 
variable

Mandriva:
Directory: /usr/share/soundfonts
File: N/A

Maybe reach out to distro maintainers and ask for their opinion on the 
matter?

And btw, what about Mac / Windows / other platforms?

// David