Re: [fluid-dev] Fluidsynth latency on ARM devel board?

[Aere Greenway]

On 01/07/2014 07:21 AM, Marcus Weseloh wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am looking for a low-powered platform to run fluidsynth with
> real-time midi input (with a fairly small soundfont < 50mb, not a huge
> 500mb monster), aiming for for very low latency performance. I've seen
> a few posts and articles about fluidsynth on a Raspberry PI, but they
> usually talk about "some latency issues". Has anybody got experience
> with one of the more powerful ARM devel boards like the beaglebone
> black, cubieboard or similar?
>
> I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas, especially with regard
> to real-time performance.
>
> Cheers,
>
>      Marcus
>
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Marcus:

I don't know about the machine you are proposing to use it on (Raspberry 
PI), but I am able to run fluidsynth (I use the qsynth GUI) on a 450 
megahertz machine (an HP Vectra), with 384 megabytes of RAM (512 
megabytes is better).

This particular machine does have a floating-point-unit (FPU) in the 
hardware.  I have heard of similar speed machines without an FPU being 
unable to run it.

On this machine, I need to use JACK (qjackctl) for it to work.  I tried 
PulseAudio, but it would not work.

It works fine in this machine, but you really do need to make 
configuration changes (security limits), or it will not work.

Also, you need to limit the polyphony to 48, and turn-off chorus, and 
reverb.

Latency (on Linux, on this machine, and on other machines) with 
fluidsynth/qsynth is very minimal.  I have no problem performing with it 
at all.  Other software synthesizers do cause me problems because of 
latency.

The processor speed does not seem to affect the latency in a 
human-perceptible amount (if any).

--
Sincerely,
Aere