I suppose CPU load is more dependent on how many voices are played at the same time as on the total size of sound font. Although the size of the sound font will certainly have an influence.
More lag and less stutter makes sense, this simply means a larger buffer.
It seems that audio buffers can be figured for eg. FluidSynth: http://sourceforge.net/p/fluidsynth/wiki/LowLatency/
Can the softsynths be configured to have a bigger cache for the sound font, or maybe load the complete sound font into RAM? I'm not sure they will do this by default, and if they have to keep loading parts of the sound font from disk than this sure may lead to stuttering. Can you see if the disk is used a lot while playing?

idspispopd wrote:

I suppose CPU load is more dependent on how many voices are played at the same time as on the total size of sound font. Although […]
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I suppose CPU load is more dependent on how many voices are played at the same time as on the total size of sound font. Although the size of the sound font will certainly have an influence.
More lag and less stutter makes sense, this simply means a larger buffer.
It seems that audio buffers can be figured for eg. FluidSynth: http://sourceforge.net/p/fluidsynth/wiki/LowLatency/
Can the softsynths be configured to have a bigger cache for the sound font, or maybe load the complete sound font into RAM? I'm not sure they will do this by default, and if they have to keep loading parts of the sound font from disk than this sure may lead to stuttering. Can you see if the disk is used a lot while playing?

Well, regarding to disk, disk usage always accompanies stutter, but not all stutter comes with disk usage. All those stutters/lags only happen when playing MIDI songs stand-alone, though. It very rarely happens when playing games that use MIDI, whether DOS games in DOSBOX or Windows games that use MIDI (like Privateer 2: The Darkening Deluxe Edition).

The amount of stutter/lag increases as sound font size increases. SGM V2.0 generates more amount of stutter than, say, GeneralUser GS, while Crisis General MIDI 3.01 being the worst offender due to its hugemongous size. Nonetheless, I still don't understand. Yes, SGM V.20 is large --it's about 240 megabytes. But my PCs have around 2 to 4 gigabytes of RAM, so 240 MB shouldn't be a problem, no?

It's probably RAM amount. 2GB is not enough. With FluidSynth and CrisisGeneralMidi, CPU load is 5% tops / 3% average (I'm on i5 2500 3.3GHz), but RAM usage is 2.3GB. I have exactly 0 dropouts or stutter though, and I think that's because I have 16GB RAM.

I can imagine that even 4GB might result in dropouts.

realnc wrote:

It's probably RAM amount. 2GB is not enough. With FluidSynth and CrisisGeneralMidi, CPU load is 5% tops / 3% average (I'm on i5 2500 3.3GHz), but RAM usage is 2.3GB. I have exactly 0 dropouts or stutter though, and I think that's because I have 16GB RAM.

I see. Very useful information, thank you very much. So it's more about RAM.

Then I guess a proper sound font appliance should be built on 64 bit OS and as much RAM as possible, while single-core CPU performance isn't really important --no need for i7, as i5 is already sufficient. Anyway, I just noticed that latest release of Fluidsynth now supports multi-core CPU. It's interesting to try, isn't sound font processing easily parallelizable?

realnc wrote:

I can imagine that even 4GB might result in dropouts.

Indeed. My laptop is 4 GB (3.25 GB usable, because I'm using 32 bit XP), and I still get stutters despite my sound font is only about 600 MB.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Anyway, I just noticed that latest release of Fluidsynth now supports multi-core CPU. It's interesting to try, isn't sound font processing easily parallelizable?

Yes, obviously you can render instruments in parallel since they don't depend on each other. But CPU load is so low anyway on modern machines, that it doesn't seem to matter much.

Although I'm not sure what you mean with "latest release." They never did a release after 1.1.6, which is from 2012.

realnc wrote:

I can imagine that even 4GB might result in dropouts.

Indeed. My laptop is 4 GB (3.25 GB usable, because I'm using 32 bit XP), and I still get stutters despite my sound font is only about 600 MB.

You can check in the windows task manager to see how much memory the process consumes and how much the OS consumes. Although I myself am on Linux, I don't think this matters much. Memory use should be about the same, at least for FluidSynth.

realnc wrote:

Yes, obviously you can render instruments in parallel since they don't depend on each other. But CPU load is so low anyway on mo […]
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Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Anyway, I just noticed that latest release of Fluidsynth now supports multi-core CPU. It's interesting to try, isn't sound font processing easily parallelizable?

Yes, obviously you can render instruments in parallel since they don't depend on each other. But CPU load is so low anyway on modern machines, that it doesn't seem to matter much.

realnc wrote:

I can imagine that even 4GB might result in dropouts.

Indeed. My laptop is 4 GB (3.25 GB usable, because I'm using 32 bit XP), and I still get stutters despite my sound font is only about 600 MB.

You can check in the windows task manager to see how much memory the process consumes and how much the OS consumes. Although I myself am on Linux, I don't think this matters much. Memory use should be about the same, at least for FluidSynth.

I'm using BASSMIDI. Oddly enough, memory use looks normal --about 1.5 GB or such. I just wonder about a thing: why are the stutters/lags less severe in games, compared to playing a MIDI song stand-alone?

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

I'm using BASSMIDI. Oddly enough, memory use looks normal --about 1.5 GB or such. I just wonder about a thing: why are the stutters/lags less severe in games, compared to playing a MIDI song stand-alone?

No idea 😐

Btw, is there some option to not load the whole soundfont file to RAM, but only the instruments that are actually needed? Maybe that would help.

Bassmididrv is great. On my actual SBLive 5.1 I couldn't play games with the Fluid soundfont as many instruments would be dropped and the initializing time for each midi was overly long. I couldn't imagine what kind of pain i'd go through with SGM 2.01 on actual hardware.

leileilol wrote:

Bassmididrv is great. On my actual SBLive 5.1 I couldn't play games with the Fluid soundfont as many instruments would be dropped and the initializing time for each midi was overly long. I couldn't imagine what kind of pain i'd go through with SGM 2.01 on actual hardware.

Never tried large sound fonts on sound font-supporting sound card; what makes it inferior compared to CPU in processing large sound fonts?

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

what makes it inferior compared to CPU in processing large sound fonts?

The fact Creative didn't know what they were doing at all, both from a driver standpoint and engineering standpoint.

The EMU chips on all the soundblasters have a idiotic memory addressing limitation, which makes using incredibly large soundfonts infeasible.

I forgot what that limit was but I think it was 29.7 MB?

DracoNihil wrote:

The fact Creative didn't know what they were doing at all, both from a driver standpoint and engineering standpoint. […]
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Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

what makes it inferior compared to CPU in processing large sound fonts?

The fact Creative didn't know what they were doing at all, both from a driver standpoint and engineering standpoint.

The EMU chips on all the soundblasters have a idiotic memory addressing limitation, which makes using incredibly large soundfonts infeasible.

I forgot what that limit was but I think it was 29.7 MB?

Then I guess it defeats the purpose of sound card on the first place. 🙁

Too bad MIDI's popularity in games is waning. If games continue to use MIDI, probably we would see a "MIDI accelerator card" of some sort where you can have multi-gigabyte sound font without lagging.

Does any game in the past 10 years use MIDI? I'm curious.

alexanrs wrote:

Does any game in the past 10 years use MIDI? I'm curious.

Gah, I should have said "have waned" instead of "is waning". This is what you get when you're typing while suffering from mild fever.

Nonetheless, too bad MIDI popularity didn't continue. If only "sound font accelerators" became as popular as 3d accelerators....

FWIW, I just tried the crysis soundfont with BASSMIDI, and it only uses 800MB. No lagging. I suspect that the software you use (which internally uses BASSMIDI), doesn't configure BASSMIDI correctly and it probably loads the whole soundfont into RAM rather than just the instruments that are used.

(Btw, the crysis soundfont sounds really, really bad with games 😵 I suspect it's supposed to be used for music production, not for playing games or game MIDI files.)

realnc wrote:

FWIW, I just tried the crysis soundfont with BASSMIDI, and it only uses 800MB. No lagging. I suspect that the software you use (which internally uses BASSMIDI), doesn't configure BASSMIDI correctly and it probably loads the whole soundfont into RAM rather than just the instruments that are used.

Well it is Winamp, but Roland VSC MIDI player also suffers the same problem (the MIDI device is set to BASSMIDI instead of Roland VSC though). However, such lag/stutter very rarely happens in games, whether it's Windows games (like GZ Doom or Privateer 2) or DOS games played in DOSBOX (like Pacific Strike). Such stutter happens more often in DOSBOX games than Windows games though.

realnc wrote:

(Btw, the crysis soundfont sounds really, really bad with games 😵 I suspect it's supposed to be used for music production, not for playing games or game MIDI files.)

Classical instruments sound pretty good. However, any other instruments than classical.... 😵

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

realnc wrote:

(Btw, the crysis soundfont sounds really, really bad with games 😵 I suspect it's supposed to be used for music production, not for playing games or game MIDI files.)

Classical instruments sound pretty good. However, any other instruments than classical.... 😵

Here, try this one (if you don't already have it):

http://expirebox.com/download/bd663d1f6bb82fb … 35d63b8616.html

(Link expires in two days.)

Sounds the least worse of everything I've tried so far with games.

bassmididrv for me, with sc55 soundfont.

realnc wrote:

Here, try this one (if you don't already have it): […]
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Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

realnc wrote:

(Btw, the crysis soundfont sounds really, really bad with games 😵 I suspect it's supposed to be used for music production, not for playing games or game MIDI files.)

Classical instruments sound pretty good. However, any other instruments than classical.... 😵

Here, try this one (if you don't already have it):

http://expirebox.com/download/bd663d1f6bb82fb … 35d63b8616.html

(Link expires in two days.)

Sounds the least worse of everything I've tried so far with games.

Thanks! So far, SGM V2.01 stacked with Drums! by Slavo and Bellatrix Orchestra works great for games, but I wonder how good the SC-55 sound font is. I can always stack it with Drums! by Slavo if the SC-55 drums are weak, and if its classical section is good enough (at least for Wing Commander or TIE Fighter), then SC-55 stacked with Drums! by Slavo could be uploaded to an AWE32 (or AWE 64 with SimnConn) for pure DOS system.