HI Ken,
There are some uses of FluidSynth I'm not familiar with and I would like to know more about these use cases.
For me, as a pretty heavy user of fluidsynth (it's my main instrument), the top things I'd request are:
Could you describe in a bit more detail how you use FluidSynth? Do you have a MIDI keyboard connected to your computer and use FluidSynth to generate the sound?
1) Streaming to use less memory.
I'm not sure what this is. Perhaps reading the soundfont information on-demand from disk instead of storing it in memory? Are soundfonts really so big that memory pressure is a problem in modern computers?
Quite often you can make a design trade-off between worst-case latency and memory usage. I would have thought that for most uses the former would be more important.
2) Enhance realtime performance with JACK. It's already pretty tight AFAICT. But I'd hope you were able to stay focussed on realtime and JACK. Particularly with heavily-multilayered soundfonts.
3) Support 24-bit soundfonts.
4) Multi-core CPU support! Soon almost every machine shipped will be dual core or quad core. jackmp has some excellent capabilities for efficiently using those multiple cores, but the applications have to take advantage of it. There wassome recent discussion on the jack list regarding this.
5) Some way to do the MIDI routing through a conf file instead of having to telnet into the thing (if you use glib, you get its built-in API for conf file reading/parsing, IIRC).
What MIDI routing capabilities do you require from FluidSynth? I thought ALSA already implemented pretty flexible MIDI routing?
6) Please keep it lightweight and command-line/daemon oriented, and resist the GUI temptation.
So just my humble requests. Fluidsynth is a great synth and again, it's my main instrument.