28 May
2003
28 May
'03
2:21 p.m.
I got an sblive oem brand new for $25, and its true that it works great as
a module. I don't have alsa working right at the moment (doing kernel
surgery right now), but my machine is only a 533 pII and the latency on
the soundfonts loaded into the sblive are basically better than my
hardware sampler. Once I'm done doing surgery with my machine I won't even
need the hardware sampler anymore. The nice thing as well is that Muse
sees it as a normal midi device, once your soundfont is loaded with
sfxload you're good to go. Fluidsynth will be very cool, but it still has
some stability issues, it always crashes Muse out and I couldn't get jack
to not freeze my machine up when I tried to connect Rosegarden4 to
Fluidsynth with it. However when these programs inevitably get more stable
the need for hardware based stuff will totally diminish. Fluidsynth
actually covers more of the soundfont2 spec than the sblive hardware does,
like the sblive doesn't allow for realtime effects modulation, while you
can actually sequence realtime effects on Fluidsynth (though only on a
fast machine).
On Wed, 28 May 2003, Daniel James wrote:
The only
concern here is that Fluidsynth will consume CPU resources which
the hardware synth won't.
And the hardware synth 'just works', as long as you have sfxload
installed. You could turn a very low spec machine into a flexible
MIDI sound module this way. We've kept our SB Live as a second card
for just this job, even though we have a much better card for
recording audio now.
Try eBay for a SB Live 512 - it shouldn't cost much.
Cheers
Daniel