Hi! I'm the upstream developer of both libdrumstick and vmpk.
> The expected behaviour is that pressing a piano key results in sound output. No sound is produced. You are correct. Anyone installing vmpk should be able to trigger sounds at once, without needing to search/download/configure soundfonts or other complex tweaks. Congratulations for pointing the bug report to the right target as well. In the past many people has complained to me about defects in the distribution/packaging, like not producing sound at once. > I can see "FluidSynth output" in the PulseAudio mixer (pavucontrol) when vmpk is running > MIDI Output "Information: Using PulseAudio driver\nError: > fluid_sfloader_load(): Failed to open '': File does not exist.\nError: Unable to open file ''\nError: ipatch_file_open() failed with error: 'No such file or directory'\nError: Failed to load SoundFont \"\"" When the default output is missing, the program picks the next best option, which is FluidSynth. But this synth requires that the user configure a soundfont file and some other parameters before producing sound. That is why the drumstick-rt backend "SonivoxEAS" was included in 2016 (v1.1.0). This synth is very straightforward, not needing external soundfont files and using embedded samples instead, so it is suitable for vmpk and other projects. The synth was ported from the Android AOSP repository, including the sources inside the drumstick source repository and tarballs for simplicity, which is against Debian and other distributions best practices and policies. Last month I've released drumstick v2.7.0 removing the Sonivox sources from the drumstick repository and tarballs, but linking to the shared external library instead, which is published at GitHub: https://github.com/pedrolcl/sonivox and some Linux distros have already picked it, but not Debian: https://repology.org/project/sonivox/versions. The sonivox dependency is optional, but in v2.7.1 the packager must opt-out explicitly or the build system complains with an error message. And it has taken place: https://salsa.debian.org/multimedia-team/libdrumstick/-/ commit/68ab93c0d4603db88d73728068d7876bcb3f1fef Your workaround is correct: downgrade drumstick to v2.6.1 to restore the expected functionality. Other alternatives: * The deb-multimedia repo (https://deb-multimedia.org/) has full/correct packages for drumstick, sonivox and vmpk among others. * My AppImage from SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vmpk/ files/vmpk/0.8.7/ * FlatPak: https://flathub.org/apps/details/net.sourceforge.VMPK In a few days I will publish a new VMPK v0.8.8 with some fixes, and it will loudly complain at startup when the default output backend is missing. Regards, Pedro
