Bug#929182: fluidsynth: no sound by default - soundfont location doesn't exist

["Fabian Greffrath" <fabian@debian.org>]

Hi Tim,

Tim Colgate wrote:
> to override the default by modifying /etc/default/fluidsynth but it
> doesn't appear that that file gets read at all (I used strace and looked
> for open() and openat() calls). It looks like fluidsynth can read config

I guess this file is only parsed if you load fluidsynth as a daemon - or
systemd service or whatever this is called today.

> Is there a mechanism in Debian for setting a default soundfount? This
> could be used by gstreamer too. My suggestion would be to add a default
> soundfont to e.g. /etc/alteratives and then modify the hard-coded path in
> cmake_admin/DefaultDirs.cmake to use it.

According to the man page, you may give the soundfont on the command line.
There is  even an example in the third paragraph: 'fluidsynth -ni
soundfont.sf2 midifile1.mid midifile2.mid'

So, this is the "official" way of starting fluidsynth with a specific
soundfont. Nevertheless, if /usr/share/soundfonts/default.sf2 is the
hard-coded fallback, we should make sure this file can be found out-of
the-box. Adding the packaged soundfonts to a set of alternatives might be
a good idea to solve this.

 - Fabian