Re: [fluid-dev] Problem starting Fluidsynth on a headless RPi

@Marcus - many thanks for your help.

I tried directing the output from fluidsynth to a file but it was too brief to reveal anything.

I also used 'aconnect -l' to determine whether it was the midi connection from my keyboard that was not being made correctly but everything was as expected;
>

Next I tried using aconnect to manually disconnect and re-make the midi connections with fluidsynth in both its 'not working' and 'working' states but again the outcome did not change. Removing the midi.autoconnect command-line switch and connecting using aconnect once fluidsynth had started also made no difference
>

This kind of made me think that the issue was not with the midi connection so I went back to looking at whether it could be the alsa audio connection.

I had received another [email-only] reply (thanks Alberto!) suggesting that I try setting my Pi to automatically create a login as root at boot time and to use the root .profile to run fluidsynth. I decided to give this a try and the first attempt failed again but I could at least see that fluidsynth was now running with an attached tty.
>

Purely by accident I ran 'sudo su' on another SSH session (and thus inadvertently started another instance of fluidsynth) and suddenly somehow fluidsynth started producing audio!!

To cut a long story short after more 'tinkering in the dark' I now have my system working as I need it to (albeit with a nasty root-login security hole - unimportant to me as this is going to be a stand-alone box).

So I now have :
>

1) a '/home/george/startfs' shell script which contains:

==========

/home/george/fluidsynth -s -i -o midi.autoconnect=1 -m alsa_seq -a alsa -g 1 /home/george/GeneralUser_GS_v1.471.sf2 &

==========
>

2) a root login created at boot time (https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/45552/login-automatically-as-root-at-startup)
>

3) root's .profile contains:

==========
>

/home/george/startfs
> sleep 2
> killall fluidsynth
> /home/george/startfs

==========
>

Somewhat bizarrely fluidsynth only produces audio via alsa having been started once, killed and restarted, but this approach does now work reliably.
>

When I get chance I may investigate using jackd or a different audio connection method, but for now I have what I need - albeit a bit of a nasty hack!!

Thanks guys for the help.

Kind regards,

George

((Somerset, UK))

From:	Ceresa Jean-Jacques
Subject:	Re: [fluid-dev] Problem starting Fluidsynth on a headless RPi
Date:	Wed, 29 Jan 2020 14:15:19 +0100 (CET)