[iiwusynth-devel] hello, thanks, and stuff

[Tim Goetze]

hi peter, hi all,

iiwusynth is great. thanks.

after having started with the 0.0.6 tarball, i yesterday switched to
CVS -- i think the CVS version should be turned into a tarball soon,
because it's so much more usable (no more stuck notes in the first
place, the -100 dB cutoff was a good idea).

there's still a couple of things i would like to see changed, please
tell me if somebody is working on any of these, and if you'd like to
see patches:

* if IIWU_VERBOSE: use iwwu_log instead of printf -- the printfs
clutter up stdout. i'm embedding multiple instances of the synth,
and it would additionally be nice if there was a way to associate
iiwu_log messages with a specific synth.

* enum iiwu_log_level: prefix all with IIWU_ (IIWU_PANIC etc) -- the
current enum names are provoking namespace collisions.

* iiwu_synth_get_gain: missing this.

* IIWU_BUFSIZE needs to be queried to optimize code that embeds the
synth. iiwu_synth_get_bufsize?

some multithreading questions:

* are iiwu_synth_program_change and fellows guaranteed never to call
malloc, do blocking disk IO or other stuff that can cause a
realtime thread to miss its deadlines?

* if they aren't, is it safe to access the synth through these
functions asynchronously from a different thread than the thread
calling iiwu_synth_write_*, and will the output be 'smooth' while
the program change is being worked on?

... and some observations on which i'd like to hear your thoughts: 

my overall feeling is that iiwu is overly sensitive to note velocity,
but that may also be a property of the soundfonts i use. anyways, i'd
like to be able to specify a float mapping to compensate for this at
runtime, rather than adjust the (integer) noteon velocity before
passing it to the synth.

the output signal of iiwusynth with unadjusted gain is very weak; it
never exceeds 0.125f with any soundfont i have. i rather 
expected it to max out at 1.0f.

btw did i mention i like the synth a lot? ;)

tim