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

Peter L Jones peter at drealm.org.uk
Thu Sep 19 18:07:32 UTC 2002


On Thursday 19 Sep 2002 04:10, Likai Liu wrote:
> I've been playing with TiMidity++ for a while, and hacked it a bit as
> well. For what I think, given the complexity of internals, it is not
> worth making TiMidity++ an LADSPA host and having to add some TiMidity++
> specific MIDI controller events.
That's why I was proposing to use NRPNs.

> Only programs that are specifically
> designed to manipulate LADSPA network in TiMidity++ would be able to
> take advantage of that feature anyways.
Err, the whole point is so I can control the LADSPA plugins from my controller 
keyboard.  Any MIDI controller would be able to do the same.

> An alternative is to make
> TiMidity++ a jack client, and then you can pipe jack output to an LADSPA
> network if you wish, via maybe ardour.

That's fine if you're controlling TiMidity++ etc from a PC - but how do I fix 
up the pipeline from my controller keyboard?

Also, I don't want to store the rendered output, I want to store the MIDI 
performance.

[snip]
> by the way, since you mentioned it, there is a big flaw in TiMidity++
> when it is used as a real time synthesizer. when you start playing midi
> and it uses some patch or sound sample that was not previously used,
> then TiMidity++ loads that patch/soundfont from disk into memory, but it
> takes too much time to do so! You really can hear a blip when that
> happens.

That depends on a number of factors (e.g. how much RAM you have).  It's not 
something that's bothering me at the moment.  I'm not skilled enough to be 
switching patches mid-play :-).

> One way to reduce the chance (but not totally eliminate) to
> that situation is to preload all patches into kernel buffer by something
> like: grep -r 'yaddi yadda' *

I only have two soundfonts to worry about - but I guess they get paged on 
demand, too.

>
> liulk

-- Peter



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