FluidSynth
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FluidSynth is a software synthesizer using SF2 sound fonts. Support for using FluidSynth as the midi playback device in ZDoom was added shortly after version 2.5.0 was finalized.
Setting up FluidSynth
FluidSynth is bundled with GZDoom since version 3.0, along with a default soundfont. The following instructions are only needed for older versions.
On Windows, the simplest method is to grab the 32-bit or the 64-bit version and place the extracted fluidsynth.dll in your ZDoom directory. The fluid_patchset console variable must be set to point to a valid SF2 sound font for it to render any output; however ZDoom may be able to automatically detect one if it exists, depending on your hardware and operating system: on Unix systems, it will look for /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GS.sf2 and on Windows it will look for CT4MGM.SF2 and CT2MGM.SF2 in the system directory (Creative drivers usually install one of them so if you have a Creative sound card it may work out of the box).
If you do not have any sound font pre-installed by your OS or your sound drivers, you will need to download one.
Advantages and drawbacks
- FluidSynth is very CPU-intensive, though this is mitigated by multicore CPUs.
- Even though FluidSynth was designed to fully support all features of the SF2 sound font format, it is also more likely than TiMidity++ to detect errors and abort loading instruments in sound fonts. A good example of this phenomenon is the Silverspring sound font, which is basically unusable with FluidSynth.
