Re: [fluid-dev] Imminent 1.1.3 release?

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

On Sunday 10 October 2010, David Henningsson wrote:
> First, so far we have not released windows .exe or .dll files, but 
> released source code only.

FluidSynth is a free software project; our mission should be to release the 
source code, and support the distributors in their mission of releasing the 
binary packages for the users. We don't provide binary packages for any Linux 
distribution, either.

FluidSynth is not really intended for final users that run a "setup.exe" 
installer and execute the application clicking its icon. It is a project 
intended for 3rd party project developers. OTOH, QSynth is an end-user 
program, so there is a QSynth installer for Windows including the FluidSynth 
DLL, available at SourceForge:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/qsynth/files/

I don't mind if somebody offers to prepare FS-only binary packages, but I'm 
not going to do it myself.

> > 1) Would it be possible to have a windows build released with both
> > dsound and jack drivers?
> 
> I'm not an expert on that area, but I don't think there should be a 
> problem with doing so.

Yes. Like in Linux and Mac OSX, several audio and MIDI drivers can be built 
into the library. The users would be able to choose a driver at runtime.

Currently, it is not possible to opt-out the DirectSound driver in Windows. 
This would require a future CMake option "enable-dsound". There is a ticket 
#77 requesting this feature.

> > 2) Would it also be possible to have a How-To on how to compile the
> > windows version of fluidsynth with both dsound and jack?
> 
> AFAIK, that would be as simple as having both development headers 
> installed when configuring/compiling the program. Cmake (or the 
> configure script) will then enable both drivers.

The problem is that several libraries that can be optionally used to build 
FluidSynth in Windows (libsndfile, jack, portaudio) are available only as  
binary installers that aren't really usable along with our build systems. They 
don't provide a .ZIP file including pkg-config support, headers and libraries 
that can be expanded at the same tree with our mandatory dependencies (glib 
and gthread).

My solution is to move the DLLs and headers to the directory where I've 
already installed glib/gthread and pkg-config. Then, edit or create [1] in the 
pkgconfig directory the files "jack.pc", "sndfile.pc" and "portaudio.pc" 
pointing to the versions, locations and flags required to include these 
optional libraries. This procedure should work for CMake, and both MinGW and 
MSVC compilers. 

I'm not going to edit a detailed how-to of the process, because it will become 
deprecated very quickly, and I think that building software requires enough 
knowledge of the process and the tools to not needing much more explanations. 
Feel free to ask questions if required.

Regards,
Pedro

[1] pkg-config
http://linux.die.net/man/1/pkg-config