Re: [fluid-dev] Fluidsynth + Portaudio device selection

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

On Sunday 17 June 2012, Massimo Callegari wrote:
> Hi Pedro,
> since we haven't made any progress so far on this issue, I would like to
> recap and find a final solution to fix it.
> 
> Given facts:
> - FluidSynth supports PortAudio
> - PortAudio can be compiled with multiple drivers (e.g. ASIO + WDMKS +
> DirectSound)
> - PortAudio can return different devices with the same name (e.g. "Device
> XY" for DirectSound and "Device XY" for WDMKS)
> - PortAudio devices must be selected by index and not by name
> - PortAudio devices can be selected from FluidSynth only by name
> - an application linking Fluidsynth should know nothing about PortAudio
> and its indexes

This is not a fact: it is your opinion, which I don't fully agree. A 
FluidSynth client should not need to know the PortAudio index, but if it 
already knows and wants to use it, this should be allowed.

> - FluidSynth sorts the devices list alphabetically from v 1.1.0, losing
> the original PortAudio index match

Nothing mandates to literally store the names returned by PortAudio in the 
FluidSynth list. 

> Said that, I see two possible solution for this issue:

As we don't agree with the problem conditions, obviously I don't agree with 
your solutions. My opinion is that the PortAudio driver should support at 
the same time (not excluding one over the other) the following features:

* allow client applications to choose directly the PortAudio device by index 
instead of name, using the option "audio.portaudio.index".

* store the names returned by PortAudio at "audio.portaudio.device" in a 
better way, avoiding duplicates.

I would implement both features the simplest possible way. I tend to prefer 
less code over verbosity and sophistication.

Anyway, I don't use the PortAudio driver myself, and there is more people 
with write permission to the FluidSynth' Subversion repository. So in 
despite of my opinion, you can post your patch here in the list and hope 
that somebody else review and approve it.

Regards,
Pedro