[LAU] Synths (software vs hardware, speed)

[james at dis-dot-dat.net]

On Wed, 22 Aug, 2007 at 01:22PM +0100, Simon Williams spake thus:
>  I'm now at the point where I can play midi files, and I have a midi keyboard 
>  connected and can play sounds to and from that.
>  Timidity is rubbish, frankly, so I'm using fluidsynth, which works fine. 
>  However, for some reason I can't get qsynth to work.
> 
>  Qsynth1: Failed to create the MIDI driver (alsa_seq). No MIDI input will be 
>  available.
> 
>  No matter what settings I try, it always fails. The only useful message I 
>  ever got was for alsa_raw, when it said that the device didn't exist. For 
>  some reason I have /dev/snd/midiC1D0, but not /dev/snd/midiC0D0. So I 
>  temporarily symlinked them, but that didn't help- it wasn't complaining 
>  about a missing device any more, but it still couldn't create the midi 
>  driver and still wouldn't tell me why not.
> 
>  Also, both fluidsynth and timidity are too slow. Midi events are routed 
>  around instantly (tested with vkeybd and the keyboard I have plugged in), 
>  but there is a delay in playing anything sent to fluidsynth or timidity- 
>  about half a second or so. I've tried running fluidsynth with nice -9, but 
>  that just makes everything else less responsive and doesn't really decrease 
>  the delay at all. Any suggestions? If I was to buy a decent sound card with 
>  a hardware synth would this fix it? Would I be able to load enough 
>  soundfonts into it? What about a pcmcia/cardbus version for my laptop?

This doesn't really answer your question, but if it works, you
might not care...

ZynAddSubFX - http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/

When I first found it, I lost two whole days to just sitting making
noises.
 
James

>  Thanks
>  Simon
>  _______________________________________________
>  Linux-audio-user mailing list
>  Linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
>  http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user
>