[LAU] setting fluidsynth as a service in debian/systemd

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

On Saturday 04 October 2014 10:42:48 Federico Bruni wrote:
> Thanks, now systemd service is starting correctly, but something is wrong
> with fluidsynth command because I cannot hear any sound. Maybe some
> ALSA/Pulseaudio conflict?

Yes. In my opinion, the problem is that you are trying to start FluidSynth as a system 
wide service, while you are using PulseAudio which is an user session service. Pulse 
doesn't start until you log into your desktop session. On your Systemd scenario, you 
would need to run Pulse also as a system service  starting before Fluid. That use case 
may be appropriate for servers, for instance when using Fluid as a reporting target for 
MonAMI sensors  (http://monami.sourceforge.net). But for normal desktop usage, my 
recommendation if you wish to use Fluid as an always available service to other 
desktop applications is to start it as an user  session service just like Pulse. To do so, 
follow the XDG autostart specification for cross-desktops:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/autostart-spec/autostart-spec-latest.html

Summary: create a fluidsynth.desktop file and place it on a suitable location like 
/etc/xdg/autostart or ~/.config/autostart/
Note: KDE has in "System Settings" -> "Startup and Shutdown" a GUI tool for easily 
editing, enabling and disabling start-up programs or scripts.

Here is a sample of a ".desktop" file tested on my KDE desktop:

$ cat ~/.config/autostart/fluidsynth.desktop 
[Desktop Entry]
Comment[en_US]=FluidSynth MIDI Synthesizer
Comment=FluidSynth MIDI Synthesizer
Encoding=UTF-8
Exec=fluidsynth -a pulseaudio -m alsa_seq -i -s -p FluidSynth -R 0 -C 0 -c 2 -z 512 -r 
48000 ~/.local/share/soundfonts/default.sf2
GenericName[en_US]=MIDI Synth
GenericName=MIDI Synth
Icon=system-run
MimeType=
Name[en_US]=FluidSynth
Name=FluidSynth
Path=
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
X-DBUS-ServiceName=
X-DBUS-StartupType=
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
X-KDE-Username=

Regards,
Pedro

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.linuxaudio.org/pipermail/linux-audio-user/attachments/20141004/ee5e7014/attachment-0001.html>