Gleam 0.0.2 has been released and can now be downloaded from here.

Release Highlights

To make installing Gleam easier, a binary release of Gleam is now available as a Debian package. This package has been carefully tested with lintian and is believed to be completely problem-free. A few notes about this package:

• For now it is only available for the PC (i386) architecture.
• The executables for Gleam's command-line tools are called gleam-playmidi and gleam-synth, to prevent potential clashes with other executables of the same name.
• Apart from these executables, the package also contains the development headers and static libraries. These will be split into a separate development package in the future.

Other changes in this release:

• Improved interface for command-line utilities.
• Fixed some MIDI controllers and added some missing ones.
• More lenient handling of some MIDI file errors.
• Fixed some incorrect implementations of the SF2 spec.
• Added debug instrumentation to synthesis to find problems more easily.
• Improved thread safety (thanks to gpothier for the patch).

The first Gleam release has been published and can be downloaded here. Being a 0.0.1 release, it is mainly intended for advanced users who want to help development by reporting problems. However, everybody is of course welcome to try it.

This release includes two command line tools:

• playmidi: Synthesizes and plays MIDI files. Can be used for faster-than-realtime synthesis to a raw audio file.

• synth: Receives synthesis events from any supported event source (such as the ALSA sequencer) and plays the result. Can be used together with any application than can generate such synthesis events.

The main known problems with the release are:

• Excessive CPU usage, which might make the tools unusable for older machines or particularly complex MIDI files.

• Many MIDI events and parts of the synthesis model are still unsupported. Because of this, while the resulting audio is very reasonable for some MIDI files, others sound pretty bad.

For building instructions, please read the Documentation on this website or the INSTALL.txt file in the released tar. To report any problems, please use the SourceForge forums for this project, which can be reached using the Contact link on the left.

I didn't know much about web authoring or CMSs before starting the Gleam site, so in the last couple of weeks I've been trying to learn a bit about it. Now that I have some more experience I've decided to migrate the site to Drupal, which seems very nice and polished. The site's colors are my choice, so if you go blind you know who to blame ;-)

On the Gleam front, sound synthesis works now. It's quite far from perfect; for example, I'm pretty sure volume is not always properly calculated. There are also a ton of missing features. That said, at least most MIDI files sound quite reasonable already.

There are still some features I want to implement before even making the first pre-release, because in its current state Gleam is only useful for curious developers who want to peek at the code. If you're one of them, please use the Browse SVN and Documentation links on the left.

Welcome to the SourceForge site for Gleam. Gleam is a software sound synthesizer based on fluidsynth and licensed under the LGPLv2. Its state is still very preliminary; no releases or even pre-releases have been made. If you're curious, you can look at the current state of the code using the Browse SVN link on the left, but unless you're planning to help develop Gleam, you won't find it of much use yet. Check this page again in a few weeks.