Re: [fluid-dev] Major degradation in sound quality & cpu usage going from Ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10

[David Henningsson]

On 11/15/2011 05:17 AM, Aere Greenway wrote:
> David:
>
> I installed the version of Fluidsynth in your PPA, and found that it
> definitely fixes the problem. Hooraaay!

Since Pedro also had a problem with this, it might make sense to release 
a 1.1.6 version with this bug fixed, to make sure it reaches 12.04.

> I had some difficulty testing it because (I think) this development
> version uses so much memory, that I couldn't run it on my 1 gigibyte RAM
> machine without having it the only thing running, and not loading the
> soundfont into the emu10k1's.

This is not expected. Did you run any further testing on this? Are you 
sure it was FluidSynth taking up all the memory, and nothing else? Did 
you run top / gnome-system-monitor to verify? What sizes are your 
soundfont files?

Or did you actually have some symptom (what symptom?) and just assumed 
it was due to lack of memory?

> It was also an unpleasant surprise to find
> that it took out the special configuration necessary for running JACK,
> but I was able to put that back in manually, after uttering some choice
> expletives...

Ehh...I have a hard time believing that this could be FluidSynth's fault.

> I highly recommend that this particular fix be included in the Ubuntu
> 11.10 release, due to the severe degradation in performance and sound
> quality of Fluidsynth that is in that release, without the fix.

This fix is only relevant for low-polyphony settings, so it does not 
affect most people (who I assume never run into lack of polyphony). That 
said, I don't mind you putting effort into trying to do so - it's a good 
fix. The process for trying to do so is here: 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates

// David