PulseAudio and sound apps (was: Re: Orphaning a few packages)

[Orcan Ogetbil]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 9:59 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> I wrote:
>> Well, actually it doesn't. It'll happily start up, but trying to actually
>> play anything outputs... nothing. With no error message or anything, it
>> just produces no sound, and AFAICT never actually connects to PulseAudio
>> (even if I try explicitly setting the ALSA output device to default or
>> pulse). The command-line fluidsynth is broken the same way. (This shows
>> another issue with the current situation: some programs claim to support
>> several APIs, but only one gets actually tested.) Well, at least there's
>> timidity++ which actually works...
>
> FYI, the issue there is just with the default settings: there is no
> soundfont configured by default in QSynth or fluidsynth. (Thanks to Jon
> Escombe for pointing this out.) When I configure one by hand (why do I have
> to do this? Should it not be the packager's job to set up a default
> soundfont?), it "works", for some definition of "working". After bumping up
> the buffer size (with the default, I just get noise as output), it suffers
> from horrible arhythmy, probably due to ALSA being used both on the
> sequencer end and on the output end, I've seen the same happen with
> timidity++ back when I was still using dmix (now with PulseAudio,
> timidity++ uses libao which uses the native PulseAudio protocol, so this
> issue is gone). Jon Escombe also pointed out that the latest fluidsynth
> release has a native PulseAudio driver (but unfortunately it's not
> available in Fedora yet), that one should work better.
>
> But this is getting way off topic for this list.
>
>        Kevin Kofler

I got comaintainership for QSynth just today and I'll look into this issue now.

Just a little more information about the soundfonts, although we are
really stretching it. The default soundfont is replaced in F-11. It
used to be PersonalCopy-Lite-soundfont, now it is fluid-soundfont-gm
which is probably the only really good free soundfont out there (here
gm stands for General Midi).

Moreover, the new soundfont package provides the virtual
"soundfont2-default". And this is what other packages should require.
If your application/library needs to hardcode a default soundfont
path, please use /usr/share/soundfonts/default.sf2, which is a symlink
that points to fluid-soundfont-gm.sf2.

We did it this way; in case the default soundfont changes again in the
future, there will be an easy transition.

Orcan