Re: [fluid-dev] Allow soundfonts to be searched from multiple directories

[Reinhold Hoffmann]

On Windows there is no special folder for soundfonts. It is up to the application.

 

We at Notation Software (www.notation.com) use

 

(a) the Windows’ Public folder for those apps where Soundfonts can be flexibly configurable.

“C:\Users\Public\Documents\Notation_3\Soundfonts”

(b) %PROGRAMFILES%\Notation_3\[app name] for those apps where only one fixed soundfont can be used

 

The advantage of the Windows Public folder (similar to the Linux distributions) vs. %HOMEPATH% is that all users of a PC can use it whereas using  %HOMEPATH% limits the usage just to one user who installed the software.

 

That said, I vote for the fluidsynth app to do it in the same way and use

C:\Users\Public\Documents\fluidsnyth\Soundfonts.

 

Using

C:\Soundfonts is not a good idea due to Windows’ admin rights policies. %PROGRAMFILES% requires the installation on admin level and should only being used for sondfonts for special apps.

 

My 2 cents...

 

Reinhold

 

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Von: fluid-dev [mailto:address@hidden Im Auftrag von sqweek
Gesendet: Samstag, 10. November 2018 07:39
An: address@hidden; FluidSynth mailing list
Betreff: Re: [fluid-dev] Allow soundfonts to be searched from multiple directories

 

On Mon, 5 Nov 2018 at 23:59, Ceresa Jean-Jacques <address@hidden> wrote:

> > The user shouldn't have to manually edit the path themselves.

>Of course he has to. Neither any maintainer nor fluidsynth are responsible for guessing how the user organizes his soundfont collection.

Yes organization soundfont is only the application need. As pointed by Sqweek E " ...there’s no standard way to do this..".

I don't think that fluidsynth package is the right place to define good conventions like standard search paths and/or configuration files.

Instead (as suggered by Sqweek E), the community of application end users should probably helps to do that. This should need time to collect those informations.

Doing a quick survey of linux distros packaging FluidR3_GM.sf2, I see these paths in use:

/usr/share/sounds/sf2/ (Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS)

/usr/share/soundfonts/ (Arch Linux, CentOS)

Yes CentOS uses both paths - but mainly the latter. I suspect its /usr/share/sounds/sf2/default.sf2 is a symlink for compatibility.

 

There's no analogous way to survey paths in use on Windows/OSX that I'm aware of. Looking on the application side, MuseScore has its own paths:

 

Windows: %HOMEPATH%\Documents\MuseScore2\Soundfonts

OSX/Linux: ~/Documents/MuseScore2/Soundfonts

 

A quick dive into LMMS source code suggests it behaves similarly, defaulting to $DOCUMENTS/lmms/samples/soundfonts on all platforms.

 

I haven't looked into whether linux package maintainers for these apps have tweaked them to look in the system paths, but either way I'm not seeing any obvious conventions for other platforms. Perhaps of interest is that LMMS on windows searches for VSTs in %PROGRAMFILES%\VstPlugins...

 

-sqweek

 

References:

https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/any/soundfont-fluid/
https://packages.debian.org/sid/all/fluid-soundfont-gm/filelist
https://centos.pkgs.org/7/epel-x86_64/fluid-soundfont-gm-3.1-16.el7.noarch.rpm.html
https://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/all/fluid-soundfont-gm/filelist

https://musescore.org/en/handbook/soundfonts-and-sfz-files#install

https://github.com/LMMS/lmms/blob/stable-1.2/src/core/ConfigManager.cpp