On Thursday, August 12, 2010, Jim Henry wrote: > Again I am just making an observation regarding something I don't do so > I could be completely off base. Is one of the uses of FluidSynth > intended to be a MIDI file player that allows the use of sound fonts? If > so, I think some of those who want to use it that way are likely to have > little understanding of MIDI and no ability to alter the MIDI files or > even know what is in them. They'll just want to load a sound font and > the MIDI file and hear what they expect to hear. FS probably can't do > that 100% but it needs to do the right thing most of the time or else it > is going to get a "doesn't work" reputation and it will take a long time > to shake that after the issue is fixed. The other alternative is to be > very clear that FS isn't intended for casual playing of MIDI files. > Trying to write software for use by the masses is really hard because it > is so difficult to anticipate what they will try to do and to grasp the > level of understanding or lack thereof. I do front line support of the > Miditzer, which has a lot of users who know almost nothing about MIDI. > The experience gives you a very different perspective on what software > needs to be.
There are many use cases for FluidSynth. Each one of the entries in the Applications list [1] may be a different one. Speaking for my own users, people who uses my KMid [2] in Linux without a hardware MIDI synth, usually choose FluidSynth as a soft-synth. KMid encourages GM standard song files, but doesn't forbid other extensions. This may be a MIDI player use case example. Another group of users want to make noise with my VMPK [3] in Linux. This program is a virtual MIDI controller, emulating one of the GM, GS or XG standards. Linux users usually prefer to run the QSynth interface along with VMPK, in a real-time-synthesizer use case example. In both cases FluidSynth may provide the low level infrastructure, but the user interface is a higher level GUI, that is where the users should find easy to use and accurate functionality. Regards, Pedro [1] http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/fluidsynth/wiki/Applications [2] http://kmid2.sourceforge.net [3] http://vmpk.sourceforge.net _______________________________________________ fluid-dev mailing list fluid-dev@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-dev
