fesco

#115 making fluid soundfont the default
Closed Opened by oget.

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The current default soundfont we have in Fedora (PersonalCopy-Lite-soundfont) is ''nonfree''. It is freely distributable but no modifications are permitted.

I packaged fluid-soundfont which is licensed under ''MIT''. This soundfont is not only free but also better quality than PC-Lite. The review request for fluid-soundfont got approved recently: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=483376

I propose to make the fluid-soundfont the default in Fedora. The only drawback will be the package size. PCLite RPM's are 27MB and 45 MB, whereas the fluid soundfont RPM's are 130MB and 200MB (the former ones are the actual soundfont and the latter are the GUS patches.).

Making the fluid-soundfont the default means:

  • To replace the '''/etc/timidity.cfg''' file provided by PersonalCopy-Lite-patches by the timidity.cfg file of fluid-soundfont-lite-patches subpackage of fluid-soundfont.

  • To drop the '''Provides: timidity++-patches = 4.1-3''' from PersonalCopy-Lite-patches

  • To add Provides: '''timidity++-patches = ?-?''' to fluid-soundfont-lite-patches. Note that the EVR needs to be adjusted accordingly. Shall we use Epoch? (the current version of fluid-soundfont is 3.1)

Additionally we can get rid of PersonalCopy-Lite for good after this change.

What are your opinions?

What shall we do in stable F-9 and F-10 branches?

I'm concerned about the size implications. Is there any way fluid-soundfont could be split up into a smaller package and some kind of extra package that doesn't need to be on the media?
Adding 100MB to our media is not a good thing. ;(

There are two packages. The main soundfont package contains a large sf2 file (~130MB). I don't know of a way of cutting the size of this one.

Then there is the GUS patches package. Originally, this one had a size of 2+ GB when I first built it. Then I removed some banks (which are also not present in the PCLite GUS package) and extracted only single layers for each instrument and reduced the size down to ~200MB. This 200MB package has more or less the same number of banks PCLite-patches package has. The difference comes from the sound quality. I can cut down the size by removing some more banks but then we'll have a less capable (but higher quality) GUS package than the one we already have.

There is no easy way of splitting this GUS package. Its contents are written in timidity.cfg . Splitting would mean that this file needs to be modified whenever a split GUS subpackage gets installed. I don't know of a way of doing this other than writing a rather powerful script. I don't think that I want to write such a script.

Why do we want these soundfont RPM's on our media? Afaik there is already no soundfont in our F-10 DVD.

I misunderstood and thought they were on the media... Sorry about that.

Thanks for the info.

This seems fine to me. Not sure it's worth changing F-9 and F-10 at this point.

FESCo is fine with this. It's up to your discretion what to do with F-9 and F-10, keeping in mind where we are in the lifecycle, and the size and scope of the change involved.
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