I’ve noticed that whenever I use an instrument to play a MIDI, it doesn’t sound like it should. All the instruments sound very similar, and the piano doesn’t sound like a piano, the violin doesn’t sound like a violin, the seashell doesn’t make water sounds etc.
I’m running the Space Station 14 Flatpak (without Steam) on Linux Mint 22.1 Cinnamon.
Does anyone know how to fix this issue? Am I missing some soundfonts or something?
Update: Is there supposed to be anything in the .var/app/com.spacestation14.Launcher/data/Space Station 14/data/soundfonts folder? Because mine is completely empty
If you run the SS14 Launcher release build from the ZIP file, not the flatpak, it should be able to access your system soundfonts in /usr/share/sounds and /usr/share/soundfonts, assuming you have something like Fluidsynth installed.
Yes, thanks for clarifying that. The empty directory is one where you can drop your own custom soundfonts.
Anyway, if you look at the SS14 source code in RobustToolbox/Robust.Client/Audio/Midi/MidiManager.cs, you can see that it is looking for certain default soundfonts in /usr/share/soundfonts and /usr/share/sound, as I mentioned.
If you run the SS14 flatpak and examine the sandbox using flatpak enter, you can verify that neither of those directories exist.
One question is: is anybody currently using the Linux flatpak and has correctly working MIDI sound out of the box? I tested it on a couple of machines and it was not working on either.
Thanks. I’ll probably stick with the Flatpak version though, instruments sounding weird is quite a minor problem and not enough to make me switch.
Me too, I hope the developers will find a way to make instruments work properly on Flatpak.
Does anyone know if this issue is actually being tracked on Github? If not, I could file a new bug for it - it isn’t going to get fixed if it hasn’t been reported.
Another thing you can do is to copy your FluidR3_GM.sf2 file into ~/.var/app/com.spacestation14.Launcher/data/Space Station 14/data/soundfonts. Then it should find it.
As it was suggested above, you can get the soundfont that comes bundled with your install of fluidsynth (wherever your linux distro stores it) and place it in the custom soundfont directory if you don’t want to allow more perms into your SS14 flatpak.
Or just put your own you find on the interwebs. I put the minecraft note block one myself
Fluidsynth is recommended in the sense it sounds OK for the purpose and is known to work. If your computer can handle it, you could test a huge-size soundfont like General Montage, in which case please report if your client performance is OK with something like that. Please experiment!
my god the songs sound soo much better with a soundfont…
why does the “default” one suck soo much… why not distribute one that has all the sounds with the game
I tested the same client and MIDI file with three different soundfonts; I was only able to reproduce this with freepats. Which does not completely answer your question, but it has something to do with that sf2 file. E.g. try it on your computer with the soundfont from the soundfont-fluid package and whatever MIDI you were testing.
I suspect it will probably pick the .sf2 version rather than the .sf3 version. The difference is that .sf3 soundfonts are much more compressed, making them take up less storage space - but this also makes them take longer to load, which I’m guessing is not ideal for use in a game
Hmm idk, I only have the GM soundfont (and MuseScore which I downloaded separately for use in VLC, because I have a couple MIDIs that sound terrible with the Fluidsynth soundfonts)
So if you have FluidR3_GM.sf2 in /usr/share/sounds/sf2 it should pick that one. However, if you have them in /usr/share/soundfonts, which apparently you do(?), then you probably want to remove the freepats soundfont.