Soundfonts alternatives and Timidity

[Thorsten Glaser]

Hi Raphaël,

>Then, all packages providing
>instruments compatible with Timidity (be it in the form of a soundfont,
>or patches like freepats) would register an alternative pointing to its
>configuration snippet to allow Timidity to load the instruments.

this is very timidity-specific while our focus is on SF2 soundfonts.

I had already suggested (somewhere in this thread) to the timidity
maintainers to change their default configuration to

	soundfont /usr/share/sounds/sf2/default-GM.sf2

which would be enough, but not perfect, to make it use the new
default soundfont system as default.

Case in point: this enables the most basic soundfont support,
but patches still need their own config and aren’t soundfont
compatible while on the other hand, TimGM6mb brings its own
optimised timidity config.

So this means that, for timidity, a different alternative is
needed (perhaps in addition), unless the current method of
changing /etc/timidity/timidity.cfg is sufficient.

HOWEVER, it is not the job of every single soundfont package
to provide specialised configuration for specific synthesisers,
unles they already have it. Uploads of soundfonts are also very
heavy on the Debian mirrors, the musescore-general-soundfont
alone is 405 MB in binary packages(!).

It is therefore an orthogonal problem, and one that can be
solved mostly independent of what we just did.

I propose that the timidity package *itself* include a configuration
snippet with

	soundfont /usr/share/sounds/sf2/default-GM.sf2

and register that with alternatives and, for sake of simplicity,
have a Depends on timgm6mb-soundfont | sf2-soundfont-gm (so that
it works out of the box), and that patches provide alternative
snippets (or they can be provided by the timidity package), and
that soundfonts that HAVE timidity-specific snippets like timgm6mb
can register those as well.

This way, all SF2 soundfonts will still work with timidity while
not being required that each include their own snippety, and you
can still use the other alternative for timidity-specific config.


The scope of sf2-soundfont-gm was to provide a standard soundfont
so that sound playing works OOTB and, perhaps, make configuration
of sound easier, but not to configure specific applications in
deep detail. We also agreed to only use GM-compatible soundfonts
in consideration, whereas timidity config can use other patches.

>I hope you'll like it and be willing to impplement it.
>
>For the record, here is the content of the original e-mail I sent in
>2016 (keep in mind that at the time, Timidity's default instruments was
[…]

I’ve not got the time to read all this at the moment, preparing
for FrOSCon, but if the above does not suffice for you and perhaps
Fabian and the timidity maintainers to hack something (which I’ll
gladly have a look on as well), I’ll get back… perhaps some time
next week.

But to make it clear: please do not propose anything that would
require every single soundfont binary package to ship a timidity
config because we just got away from needing that.

Thanks,
//mirabilos
-- 
„Cool, /usr/share/doc/mksh/examples/uhr.gz ist ja ein Grund,
mksh auf jedem System zu installieren.“
	-- XTaran auf der OpenRheinRuhr, ganz begeistert
(EN: “[…]uhr.gz is a reason to install mksh on every system.”)