It would be great to have legato and portamento triggering of samples in either the main engine or in the soundfont plugin builder/player if that’s easier. I would really like it for bass and leads. I know this has been mentioned before with some interest, but I was seeing if that interest was still there.
For anyone interested, I found a solution of sorts to this involving the soundfont plugin creator after thoroughly studying the Fluid Synth poly/mono documentation found here. Despite there not being direct controls in the plugin menu, you can send midi CCs from the midi track (or controller I assume) to switch between monophonic and polyphonic playback, enable legato, enable portamento and adjust portamento time.
The CCs are as follows:
Mono on - 126
Poly on - 127
Legato off/on - 68
Portamento off/on - 65
Portamento time in 128 ms increments - 5
Portamento time in <128 ms increments - 37 but you must set CC5 to 0 first
As far as switching between mono and poly I found that when using the A and B buttons I had to assign it as a gated CC. It doesn’t toggle so they need to be assigned separately. Legato is automatically on when switching to mono as well. Control behavior (gate, toggle etc) is key when trying to assign CCs to controls directly on the S2400.
The only hiccup I came across is that there seems to be some sort of range limit for legato and portamento. By this I mean the envelope is retriggered regardless. I can’t remember the exact notes and don’t have a keyboard in front of me, but they were pretty far apart. Whatever the said note was it also happened when going up from the one before it but not down. I didn’t study the polyphone structure of the soundfont, but this happened at the exact same point with both the Isla supplied instrument plugins as well as the mo phatt soundfont I purchased from digital sound factory. I’m not a programmer so I don’t know if it has to do with the version of fluidsynth used to build the plugin creator, is a limit of fluidsynth itself or if I’m missing something else that needs to be “switched on”. Either way I haven’t really found it to be a dealbreaker and very much like having this functionality.