[LAU] Synths (software vs hardware, speed)

[Dave Robillard]

On Wed, 2007-22-08 at 13:22 +0100, Simon Williams wrote:
> 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.

Use a smaller (audio) buffer size.

-DR-