[linux-audio-dev] LADSPA and TiMidity++

[Peter L Jones]

On Tuesday 17 Sep 2002 23:23, David Olofson wrote:
> On Tuesday 17 September 2002 20.33, Peter L Jones wrote:
> > Hi there,
> >
> > Do you (or the list) happen to know if anyone has considered making
> > TiMidity++ a LADSPA host?
>
> Can't remember hearing anything like that...

Well, that's a start -- google couldn't find anything but I thought I better 
check.

>
> BTW, considering that timidity (AFAIK) was originally designed as an
> off-line rendering tool, more than a real time synth, how well does
> it work in a real time environment?

Well, when I had "-B 8,11" (8 x 2^11 byte buffers), the latency was, um, 
rather amusing :-).  Dropping this to "-B 4,4" means I can't feel any latency 
between key press and sound.  (Dropping to -B 3,3 caused very strange 
behaviour (that lead to an uncontrolled reboot) and -B 2,2 was too small - 
very strange noises produced.)

>
> (I'm talking about low latency mixing with live MIDI input, rather
> than playing back MIDI files with a large audio buffer. And no, I
> don't know how well timidity performs in this regard. Just pointing
> out some potential issues to keep in mind with any soft synth setup,
> basically.)

Yup - my default set up is tuned for file playback, so it's tuned to even out 
any problems caused by system performance.  For manual play, it needs to be 
tuned for low latency, which -B 4,4 appears to achieve (at least, I've not 
yet come across further problems...).

[snip - other topic in next reply]

-- Peter