Fluidsynth on Windows

[wesleyjohnson]

I have heard how bad the MIDI music sounds on Windows.  I was wondering how many users are installing Fluidsynth, or some other replacement MIDI player.    I have heard that MS has been making it harder to install Fluidsynth lately (a separate issue from volume controls).

How useful would it be to have a MIDI player menu selection in a port such as DoomLegacy ?

Is the situation in Windows so bad that this should be a Linux only feature ?

 

I program on Linux, so I must ask about the Windows situation, especially as my latest Windows is an XP, and that unit is only setup on a as-needed basis.

 

[Gez]

As far as I know, Fluidsynth on Windows is used as an option in ports such as PrBoom+ and ZDoom, and in utilities such as SLADE 3. You can find precompiled libfluidsynth.dll and libfluidsynth64.dll on ZDoom.org.

[Graf Zahl]

50 minutes ago, wesleyjohnson said:

 MS has been making it harder to install Fluidsynth lately

 

That really depends on what you want to do. If you just ship a DLL with your executable in the same directory there won't be any problems.

Problems will only arise if you want to copy the DLL to a system directory, but that's highly discouraged anyway.

 

[riderr3]

Legacy probably only source port which have problem with midi playing on Windows. I using VirtualMidiSynth tool to play midis. All source ports have no problems with this but In Legacy midi music are very stutters.
Adding fluidsynth as alternative would be great.

[Jon]

Choco has midi volume playback problems, AlexMax is fixing them 

[VGA]

Coolsoft VirtualMIDISynth

 

The solution to all such problems. The end.

[Master O]

22 hours ago, VGA said:

Coolsoft VirtualMIDISynth

 

The solution to all such problems. The end.

 

And to add to that, this is a good soundfont:

 

http://www.mediafire.com/download/g6bmov62qmbky03/Patch93s_Roland_Sound_Canvas_V2.2_soundfont.zip

 

Originally from the following link:

 

 

Yes, I know the clip itself is from Descent, but the soundfont also works very well with Doom and Doom 2.

[LuciferSam86]

I am using the arachno soundfont and I've found it very good (beware uncompressed is 170 megs)

[blueinferno776]

I use the roland sc-55 presets soundfont to prerender the midis into its own wad and so far its blown me away. Best to use Coolsoft or Bassmidi softsynths for it due to fluidsynth butchering the playback somehow. It does sound a lot better then any soundcanvas sf2 I listened to.

 

The soundfont

here: https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=!APGActebnI7onfw&cid=2560AB987048B49F&id=2560AB987048B49F!1222&parId=root&action=locate

 

My converter of choice

here: https://github.com/KaleidonKep99/Keppys-MIDI-Converter/releases

[VGA]

VirtualMIDISynth has a converter embedded. You can convert any MIDI file using the soundfonts you have enabled.

 

 

[blueinferno776]

9 hours ago, VGA said:

VirtualMIDISynth has a converter embedded. You can convert any MIDI file using the soundfonts you have enabled.

It seems to only do one midi at a time and lame and ogg2 codecs are not prepackaged. The one I use converts the midis say obout 35 of them loaded to a list and converts all of them at once. And it very easy to use.

 

Quote

 

 

 

[Danfun64]

On 3/30/2017 at 1:40 PM, riderr3 said:

Legacy probably only source port which have problem with midi playing on Windows.

Legacy has problems playing midi in general. IIRC the mus2midi bug which affected the old version of Freedoom's d_runnin still hasn't been fixed.

[wesleyjohnson]

Thank you for the interest.

 

The statement that DoomLegacy was the only platform having trouble playing MIDI on Windows is not true.  All the ports were having trouble playing MIDI on Windows, that is why so many Windows ports have have some alternate MIDI code, to avoid the Windows MIDI player.

 

I was not planning on shipping any FluidSynth DLL for Windows.   I cannot maintain any such code, and cannot even verify that it would work for any percentage of the Windows users.  I was more considering discovering if the user had installed FluidSynth and then giving the option of making use of it.

 

I cannot tell from the responses if any of the FluidSynth installs intercept the default MIDI output stream (such that the application does not need to route to FluidSynth).   Maybe the VirtualMidiSynth does something like that.

Thank you for the references to programs that use FluidSynth.  Maybe I can find what I need by looking at their code.

 

I am always looking at fixing bug reports.  But Windows sound related bug reports are just so useless for fixing anything.

I will have to look for a mus2midi bug report now.  But if there was a useful bug report on the issue, I would have fixed it by now as I made a deliberate effort to find and fix as many of those as I could in the past year.  I know of no problems with DoomLegacy playing MIDIs in general.

I do not know of any stuttering.  I have the XP to test with and do not have any problem besides the poor sound (and the guitar) of the default Windows Midi player.  Stuttering on a more modern Windows is likely the poor Windows default Midi Player.

 

PS.

If it turns out that not many users are installing FluidSynth to fix their poor default Midi Player, then there will not be much use in adding code to output to such a Midi Player.

Expecting every game to independently fix the poor Windows Midi player leads in an entirely different direction.

 

If MS does not allow FluidSynth to be installed by the user as a fix for the poor Windows Midi player, then that is exactly what it means by MS making it harder to install FluidSynth.

Please do not confuse this with some program using some library DLL.

 

 

 

Edited April 7, 2017 by wesleyjohnson : PS

[VGA]

The native midi support sucks but riderr said he is using the VirtualMidiSynth program, which installs a bassmidi driver. And he said that all ports he tried work properly except Legacy. So we are not talking about Windows's native midi support, which is crap.

[riderr3]

I have a second laptop with installed XUbuntu and have no problems with Legacy until I moved to Win8 on my current laptop.

Though many modern sourceports provide alternative ways for playing midi, not only fluidsynth.