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schellingb / dosbox-pure

DOSBox Pure is a new fork of DOSBox built for RetroArch/Libretro aiming for simplicity and ease of use.
GNU General Public License v2.0
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[Feature request] BASSMIDI #508

Closed Torinde closed 2 weeks ago

Torinde commented 2 weeks ago

BASSMIDI, a MIDI software synthesizer that supports SF2/SFZ soundfonts.

Explanation:

a large number of soundfonts having been designed with BASSMIDI in mind and as a result they sound wrong with fsynth. Whenever you use a soundfont with fsynth that has distortion/clipping issues with some instruments while others are barely audible, or some of them just sound completely broken, you use BASSMIDI instead and it sounds completely fine. That usually means the soundfont's author was using BASSMIDI.

On Windows, people simply use some kind of BASSMIDI driver. There's no such thing on Linux (at least not without resorting to Wine) and macOS, so that's why this was added directly into dosbox.

schellingb commented 2 weeks ago

Bassmidi is closed source so it doesn't really fit this project. Ideally the soundfont library we use would be improved via contributions to that project so we reach more compatibility and audio quality.

Torinde commented 2 weeks ago

OK, just to note how it seems to be done in Core:

We don't link against the BASS/BASSMIDI libraries. We dlopen() them so that the core can be distributed without those libs in a GPL-compliant way.