Bug#929182: fluidsynth: no sound by default - soundfont location doesn't exist
Package: fluidsynth
Version: 1.1.11-1
Severity: wishlist
Tags: upstream
Dear Maintainer,
I was trying to play a midi file with:
fluidsynth -a pulseaudio sample.mid
but this can never work.
fluidsynth tries to get the soundfont from /usr/share/soundfonts/default.sf2 which is hardcoded into the executable, but this directory doesn't exist under Debian. I thought I might be able 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 from $HOME/.fluidsynth or /etc/fluidsynth.conf but I couldn't work out how to set the soundfont - there is a setting "synth.default-soundfont" but that appears to be hard-coded in src/synth/fluid_synth.c
I can obviously fix the problem by creating a link from /usr/share/soundfonts/default.sf2 to e.g. /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2 but this isn't very satisfactory.
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.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
Versions of packages fluidsynth depends on:
ii libc6 2.28-5
ii libfluidsynth1 1.1.11-1
Versions of packages fluidsynth recommends:
ii qsynth 0.5.0-2
fluidsynth suggests no packages.
-- Configuration Files:
/etc/default/fluidsynth changed:
SOUND_FONT=/usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2
-- no debconf information
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