Start and control MIDI file playback from fluidsynth's shell?

[nickbailey]

Is is possible to start and control midi file playback at the fluidsynth shell prompt?

Context: I'm using fluidsynth 2.1.7 on Debian 11 to perform microtonal music and it's working very well. I've written a very small tkinter application to set tunings and programs so the keyboardist doesn't type commands into the fluidsynth shell. It just opens fluidsynth as a writable pipe and sends commands which are received by fluidsynth.

Now the end-user wants to play a MIDI file though the setup, maybe by dropping it on the python app. I'm wondering if I can start and stop such playback by issuing fluidsynth shell commands. I understand I could rewrite the whole thing using the library, but if it comes to that I might as well just ask the user to use a sequencer instead.

[derselbst]

Shell commands for the MIDI player have been added in fluidsynth 2.2.0. Execute help player for more details.

[jimhen3ry]

help player

player_start Start playing from the beginning of current song
player_stop Stop playing (cannot be executed in a user command file)
player_cont Continue playing (cannot be executed in a user command file)
player_seek num Move forward/backward in current song to +/-num ticks
player_next Move to next song (cannot be executed in a user command file)
player_loop num Set loop number to num (-1 = loop forever)
player_tempo_bpm num Set tempo to num beats per minute
player_tempo_int [mul] Set internal tempo multiplied by mul (default mul=1.0)

Is there a way to load a MIDI file to the player from the FluidSynth shell command prompt?

[derselbst]

Is there a way to load a MIDI file to the player from the FluidSynth shell command prompt?

Currently not.

[nickbailey]

Thanks for confirming that. Maybe player_clear_playlist and player_add_item (song, no! ;) ) would do the trick.

I'm ok at C and C++. Maybe I should like around the source a bit...