[SDL] [PATCH] FluidSynth backend for SDL_mixer

[James Le Cuirot]

On Sun, 04 Mar 2012 17:49:09 +0200
Nikos Chantziaras <realnc at arcor.de> wrote:

Hi Nikos. I recognise you from the Gentoo community.

> Many thanks for this.  Most distros now offer a recent enough
> FluidSynth and SDL_mixer 1.2.12 (which has your patch included), so
> I'm getting nice MIDI quality now :-)

Thanks for the feedback. I wasn't aware there had been a release. I had
plans for this new feature, mainly to discourage DXX-Rebirth and Return
to the Roots from distributing their music as digital audio, which is a
waste of bandwidth among other things. Unfortunately I ran out of time
for playing games. :(

> However, there's a small problem.  The audio's volume is way too low. 
> FluidSynth has a default gain of 0.2.  Apps using both MIDI and
> digital audio have a problem, since when you turn up your speakers to
> make MIDI audible, the other sounds become extremely loud.
> 
> Is there a way to raise the FluidSynth gain to something more
> sensible, like 0.8?

I did experiment with this though I forget the exact results now. It
can go all the way up to 10 but I must have found 0.8 to be very loud,
otherwise I wouldn't have set that as the maximum. Both of the games I
was trying allowed you to configure the digital audio and MIDI volumes
independently. In DXX-Rebirth, I prefer to have the music louder than
the effects so I set the music to 100% and the effects to about 60%. I
must admit that I didn't measure the output but it probably will vary
between games and SoundFonts. What I heard did seem to reflect these
settings at least. Which game are you trying?

Regards,
James