Re: [fluid-dev] Proposal for a new feature: lazy-loading of SoundFonts

[Philippe Simons]

Seems to forks fine on Android.

On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 7:25 PM, Tom M. <address@hidden> wrote:

I keep thinking about this preloading feature and I'm not yet fully convinced of it. I see quite high obstacles for it being beneficial i.e.:

- We need a user who plays MIDI files via command line and listens to them in real-time.
- The user must actively enable on demand sample loading
- The MIDI file(s) must make use of on-the-fly program changes (because only then hearable sound interrupts will occur)

I can fully understand to enable dynamic sample loading for non-realtime szenarios (like file rendering), or for Marcus special resource limited environment. But the only reason for a normal user to enable dynamic sample loading I see is to save memory when playing back a MIDI file with a very big (>1GiB) soundfont. But the low latency of the playback requires to have the samples in memory. After all this preloading feature would only mask the high latency of dynamic sample loading. And in worst case it would minimize the memory gain of the dynamic sample loading to zero, i.e. when it preloads (nearly) all samples or only the biggest ones.

So, do we need sample preloading?

Tom

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