Bug#715461: libsdl-mixer1.2: no sf2 sound fonts loaded by default

[Fabian Greffrath]

Package: libsdl-mixer1.2
Version: 1.2.12-5
Severity: normal

Hello,

the current version of libsdl-mixer1.2 is able to use fluidsynth for midi
playback, which is far superior compared to the embedded copy of timidity which
relies on sound fonts in the obsolete pat format (and thus requires the
freepats package to play music). However, fluidsynth requires sound fonts in
the sf2 format to be able to play music.

To achieve this, two things have to be changed in the current Debian package:
1) Debian currently ships three sf2 sound font files in the fluid-soundfont-gs,
musescore-soundfont-gm and fluid-soundfont-gm packages, respectively. These
packages should get promoted to Recommends with a higher priority than
freepats:
- Recommends: freepats
+ Recommends: musescore-soundfont-gm, fluid-soundfont-gm, freepats
I have given the musescore-soundfont-gm package higher priority, because it is
a complete set but has only 6MB compared to the 145Mb of fluid-soundfont-gm.
fluid-soundfont-gs is out of this list, because I did not get it working
without its bigger brother fluid-soundfont-gm installed alongside.

2) The list of available sound font files is currently set to NULL in
music.c:148 and relies on the SDL_SOUNDFONTS environment variable to contain a
list of appropriate files. However, it should get initialized with the known
locations of the sf2 sound font files available in Debian:
- char* soundfont_paths = NULL;
+ char* soundfont_paths =
"/usr/share/sounds/sf2/TimGM6mb.sf2:/usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2";

This will enable high quality music playback *by default* (at least higher
quality than using the internal timidity copy with freepats).

 - Fabian



-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (900, 'stable'), (800, 'testing'), (700, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.9-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages libsdl-mixer1.2 depends on:
ii  libc6              2.17-7
ii  libflac8           1.3.0-1
ii  libmad0            0.15.1b-8
ii  libmikmod2         3.1.12-5
ii  libsdl1.2debian    1.2.15-5
ii  libvorbis0a        1.3.2-1.3
ii  libvorbisfile3     1.3.2-1.3
ii  multiarch-support  2.17-7

Versions of packages libsdl-mixer1.2 recommends:
ii  freepats  20060219-1

libsdl-mixer1.2 suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information