Re: [fluid-dev] Problem in fluidsynth (Ubuntu 11.10) still in Ubuntu 12.04

[Aere Greenway]

David:

Thanks for checking to verify the actual current situation.  

I will follow the link you provided and pursue the process to get it fixed, since this is important to me.  Without the fix, the best of the demo music supplied in my MIDI music education course will not play.  

Furthermore, if anyone using Qsynth, for whatever reason, exceeds the maximum polyphony, Qsynth enters a 'bad state' where many new notes fail to play, and the only way out of it is to re-start the Qsynth engine.  

I have no idea why the music/sequence is exceeding the polyphony limit of 256.  Perhaps notes are left 'sounding' for long periods of time.  I do a lot in the pieces with the sustain pedal, but not enough to exceed the polyphony limit of 256.  

I can avoid this piece triggering the 'bad state' of Qsynth by muting the secondary track of what I call a 'composite voice', but by doing so, it takes away the really neat sound, and makes it more 'ordinary'.  

Is there any way the 1.1.6 version of FluidSynth (suitable for Debian/Ubuntu) could be made available in a PPA (like I used for Ubuntu 11.10)?  

Or is there a Debian package way of accomplishing this?  

I have thought of constructing a re-packaged (dpkg-repack) version of the Ubuntu 11.04 version of Qsynth, with fields indicating that it replaces the components that fail in the release level.  

If there were available a Debian package of the 1.1.6 version, it could just be installed, and it would naturally replace the bad version.  

I am a newbie when it comes to constructing Debian packages.  Perhaps, with your greater expertise, you can suggest a better way of accomplishing this.  

As I recall, I went through a lot of effort to build the current version of FluidSynth, but I had problems because the FluidSynth developers don't use JACK, and the development version caused problems with using JACK.  The JACK audio connection kit is essential to me.  I cannot leave it out.  

- Aere

On Wed, 2012-05-02 at 15:47 +0200, David Henningsson wrote:
> On 04/28/2012 06:40 AM, Aere Greenway wrote:
> > All:
> >
> > Months ago, I discovered a problem with fluidsynth where voices for new
> > notes would fail to play because (my guess) older notes which had faded
> > to inaudible status were still playing.
> >
> > I worked with David Henningson on this problem, and he made a fix for it
> > available (in a PPA).
> >
> > This fixed the problem in Ubuntu 11.10, and I assumed it would be fixed
> > in the next release of Ubuntu (12.04).
> >
> > Unfortunately, the problem (or a similar, new problem) is in the version
> > of fluidsynth in Ubuntu 12.04.
>
> The bug is still present in Ubuntu 12.04.
>
> This mainly due to lack of time/priority/thought from my part.
>
> There has not been a release of FluidSynth lately, so there is no 
> upstream release that could have flown the "natural" way through Debian 
> to Ubuntu.
>
> And, nobody has tried to backport the actual commit (as a bug fix) to 
> Debian or Ubuntu.
>
> For Ubuntu 12.04, this fix should be SRUable, if somebody just sits down 
> and does the paperwork: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates
>
> I guess we could also release a version 1.1.6 of FluidSynth with the 
> current tree in it, if we like.
>
> // David

-- 

Sincerely,
Aere