Re: [fluid-dev] Dealing with startup

[Edenyard]

John O'Hagan wrote:
> Ben Leggett wrote:
>
> > [...]
> > Currently, I start fluidsynth in a shell script in conjunction with
> > Dosbox, as opposed to systemwide, since the soundfont I use makes
> > fluidsynth take up quite a lot of memory.
> >
> > Because this soundfont is large, fluidsynth startup time can take quite
> > a while, and can vary depending on whether it's a cold start or not.
> >
> > Is there a way in a shell script to tell if fluidsynth has finished
> > loading a font? Using "sleep" doesn't always produce the desired
> > effects, since the load time is, as I said, quite variable. To recap, I
> > need a way to wait for fluidsynth to finish loading before I start
> > anything else.
>
> I recently came across the same issue; I dealt with it (in Python) by using a 
> while loop  to keep trying to connect to fluidsynth server at its "localhost 
> 9800" address:

I had the same problem when putting together a system using Fluid and 
Jorgan and I devised a Bash script to make the necessary connections 
after loading Fluid but before loading Jorgan. (I've shown the script 
below between the lines of #####s).

However, although it works, it seems to cause another problem: it seems 
to slow down the loading of my soundfont considerably. I wondered 
whether that was something to do with the testing loop taking up too 
many CPU cycles that should have been used on Fluidsynth's loading. I'm 
not much of a programmer (as my script probably reveals) and I'm 
somewhat stuck to know what the solution is. For now, I've resigned 
myself to accepting the very l-o-n-g SF load time but it would be nice 
to be able to speed it up a bit. For reference, the SF2 file is about 
275 Mb in size.

Any clues would be very gratefully received. I only just cope with Bash 
scripts so I don't think that I could handle anything of a higher nature!

Cheers,
Gerald

##### Script to connect Fluidsynth once it's running ####

#!/bin/bash
###
### Connect Fluidsynth to VirMIDI.
### 7/9/2005.
###
echo "Waiting for Fluidsynth . . ."
while true
do
  aconnect -o | grep "Synth input port" > /dev/null
  FINDFLUID=$?
  if [ $FINDFLUID -eq 0 ]
  then
    echo "Fluidsynth running!"
    break
  fi
done
echo "Connecting Fluidsynth to Virtual MIDI . . ."
sleep 0.2
aconnect "Virtual Raw MIDI 1-0":0 FLUID:0
aconnect "Virtual Raw MIDI 1-1":0 FLUID:1
aconnect "Virtual Raw MIDI 1-2":0 FLUID:2
CONNECTFLUID=$?
if  [ $CONNECTFLUID = 0 ]
then
  echo "Fluidsynth connected!"
fi


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